The opposite of irony is nakedness. To be available to the eyes of others. So instead of ironic furnishings—coconut-shell lampshades for the tourist you’re not, each Aloha, Willkommen thing worse than the next, that’s the point—a person buys a painting she can afford and hangs it in her house. Gives it something called pride of place. In this, the very rich resemble the not-so-rich-at-all: taste displayed according to means. What you see is what they like. Ugly, vapid, tender, exquisite: you’re free to judge. Such things in a frame, on a shelf front and center, crass/gilded, frank/quiet, are defenseless, sent forth without armor, or veils.
*
Sincerity can’t be applied like a salve, or plaster, or be arranged to countervail irony. That won’t cure it. Sincerity doesn’t take measures to appear to be, or to seem. Asked to prove itself, its voice squeaks. Its eyes water, walking into the wind. In rough surf, it erodes. In heat, it sweat-stains. Its gauges work. It’s accurate. To be an apple tree in fall, to fully enter the realm of gold, to be right up against the no-longer-green—that move can’t be scripted. Sincerity isn’t in service of. A tree doesn’t will itself to turn, to feel darkness and chill crenellate its leaves, then let go. Trees give over. That phrase the promise of spring? Trees really believe it.
*
Irony masks. It prepares for, in advance. No one sees its heart adjusting, dimming, tamping. Irony won’t admit to heart (too messy, percussive). It ducks into corners and drops from eaves. It sniffs for changes in weather so as to be first to deflect. Irony’s a stick figure in an oversized coat. It refuses the pleasures of shivering, the anticipation of a warm house after taking the garbage out—in a T-shirt, in an ice storm—those small restorations, minor hardships that stoke gratitude.
*
Irony rules its subjects like a monarch—the fiefdom-centric variety, not the butterfly hereing and thereing, looping up, ferrying a clutch of sweetness, alighting on ripening buds with gifts, such delicate work, the scattering of gold.
*
Irony’s internal compass is wobbly. It suffers from tracking a northernish star. Irony references, cites, points to—and in doing so, advances not at all. Each year its finger grows longer and thinner, as pale and slippery as a stalactite. Its weather is clammy. Its system low-pressure. It suffers not the exertions of sun, which shines equally on the deserving and the not-so, the vast sea of us all. Irony isn’t equipped to navigate rough democracies.
Irony has no hidden reserves. It sits and stews. If “boredom is an opportunity; a state in which hope is being secretly negotiated” (tacked on my bulletin board, author unknown)—then irony’s not fit to negotiate. (But wait, I looked it up just now … it’s from a review of philosopher/psychologist Adam Phillips! Irony would do well to get excited about discoveries, be agog, still, at the powers of the web.) Irony would do well to search for … something. And let disappointment come if it will. Maybe envy. Squirm in frustration. Because none of this—boredom, disappointment—will kill you. Out of real need, or absence, or tedium, irony might make something.
*
Irony is the outward sign of a feeling one’s trying not to have. The adult version of yanking your crush’s braid on the playground. See, it announces, I’m not interested! The wide-lapel suit, worn not-seriously. The studiously untended mutton chops.
The song “How Deep Is Your Love,” though I hated it, was part of the soundtrack of my thirteenth year, and my long stay in the hospital. I loved a boy then, who was having the same back surgery. He was funny and gentle; I missed him when one of us was wheeled away for a procedure. His family lived nearby in the South Bronx and they always brought lots of food and shared with my parents. I know we kissed. How did we manage that, both of us stuck in body casts?
After, we wrote a few letters, but we never saw each other again.
I can’t imagine that song played, say, at a dinner party, the table set with wineglasses from Bea’s & Roger’s (that double possessive!) Aniversery Cruise (and that spelling), 1977.
I don’t imagine anyone liked the smell of coal trains, blackening the Russian stations of their childhood. But much is returned by way of it, admixed with sausages, perfume, cigarettes. The most unlikely song or whiff will guard a past and sail it back when you’re least expecting it. Thus a person might find herself in tears, right there in the dentist’s chair, the classic rock station playing endless Bee Gees. Or when passing a newly tarred street in Ohio, a whole country, an era, Moskovsky Station in winter, steams up in the summer heat.
*
Irony has no sense of time. So what might have been meaningful once—blue Snoopy lunch box, his gladness at the midday reunion—is wiped away by irony’s taking it up again as a find, an amusing accessory. Irony opposes the heirloom, the keepsake. It turns away from good leftovers. Won’t cook up a fresh, fancy thing on a special occasion. A thing that might fail, burn, collapse. Require the guests’ good cheer and willingness to order last-minute pizza, be part of a wholly disastrous dinner but a great story ever after—i.e., history.
*
Irony travels in one direction, around and around an inner circle. A kids’ TV show I used to watch, Zoom, ran a skit with a character called Fannee Doolee. She liked any person, place, thing, or concept with double letters in it, but hated its non-double-lettered equivalent, so “Fannee Doolee likes sweets but hates candy.” You could figure out how to play the game if you watched and listened for a while, but it wasn’t apparent right away. Tuning in every week, you had to suss out the hints. Something was there to be decoded. It was a challenge. A riddle. (Once you figured it out, you could send in your own example to be read on TV.) A riddle is an invitation, a game about roaming in language, while irony cordons off play. Admits only the knowing few. The tickets are invisible. You can’t buy them anywhere. In this way, irony both suggests and thwarts travel.
Its inside track is a very small circle.
*
There is nothing animal about irony. Animal is. Last week, when I was walking my dog in the woods (urban woods with nearby streets), we were set upon by a pack; at first, dog by dog, they were tame, sniffing and romping and chasing Ruby. Then something turned. A mind like a wind blew though the dogs, gathered strength like a wave from far off, and rose up. It was as slow and elemental as a tide. Once it entered, the conversion was swift. They closed in on my dog, growling and jumping and wouldn’t listen to their owner’s shrill whistle. We slipped through a hole in the fence just in time.
The dogs weren’t kidding. And they weren’t angry. Just subject to a force that turned them deeply back into themselves. It was an amazing thing to watch: instinct finding a vein and entering. In them was nothing cruel or trained. They made an old shape, an organism that worked as one, which was beautiful and terrifying to see.
*
Irony lets you know it knows.
Look, I’m from New York. That “We’ve seen it all” attitude? There’s something to it, beyond arrogance. If you’ve seen it all—in the course of a recent hour, two Great Danes in mink coats (full length, I guess you’d say), a guy selling dentures from a backpack (“unused”)—then irony’s passé. Something else overtakes—older than irony. Brisker. Sharper. The daily surreal. The absurd. All the infinite, unpredictable ways to be human. It’s New York: you do what you want. Ride your bike in a bikini with a snake as a necklace (it was hot that day, she was en route to the pet sitter, and he really likes to go for rides.) The closer you come to the absurd, the more irony looks kind of homegrown, provincial. All that time put in to make an impression, all that care taken to seem not to care.
There’s a moment in Nabokov’s memoir, Speak, Memory, where he gets actually angry with those who can’t detect his special variety of immigrant loss: “The following passage is not for the general reader, but for the particular idiot who, because he lost a fortune in some crash, thinks he understands me. My old (since 1917) quarrel with the Soviet dictatorship is wholly unrelated to any question of property. My contempt for the émigré who ‘hates the Reds’ because they ‘stole’ his money and land is complete. The nostalgia I have been cherishing all these years is a hypertrophied sense of lost childhood, not sorrow for lost banknotes.” Irony doesn’t immigrate. All that contempt, nostalgia, real sorrow—not safe passage.
Of course, irony’s all over New York, in so many forms and registers: those giant, balloonish, steel bunny sculptures; or a boutique’s curated collection of vintage Mr. Bubble, Pop-Tart, Jetsons T-shirts. Both sort of, kind of make you laugh, but not too much. Maybe once. Not out loud. More a mumbly appraisal-sound.
The absurd’s both public and shared. Like water fountains. Like air.
The absurd understands brevity, longing, how much is thwarted or unmet, or met only partly. It acknowledges the infinite scheme, confirms the stark/tender, sad/sweet endless ways to be human—counter, original, spare, strange, as Hopkins wrote—and the lightness attending that recognition; the flash of all that is perishable. The absurd allows for quick glance exchanged with seatmate on bus, appreciation, something, for the old guy whose leashed monkey totes his own little backpack. That brief moment, I don’t know what it is, except abundant in New York, and available in so many versions, tongues, flavors: Puerto Rican. Senegalese. Korean. Etc. The quick-unaccountable. The fragile-but-ancient.
Ironic is no one’s country of origin. Oh, I get it alright. It’s just not interesting. It won’t be amazed. It won’t admit fear. There isn’t a bit of longing in it. No danger. No failure. No dream.