Charm--->No Need For God's Love

I’m going to be talking a lot about charm. This may be the extension of a trend that began with my “Irony” project. When I first began writing on irony, I was sure that the exploration of that term and idea would lead to an exposure of the Ineffable, if only I could just talk about it enough. For some reason, desperately and endlessly exploring the implications (imagined most likely) of a term seems the only truth I can scare up. Maybe its got a little to do with Bible-envy. Though I claim to be as godless as they come, I do wish I had a single something to analyze and analyze and sermonize from for my whole life. I often wanted to do that with Hawthorne’s House of the Seven Gables, but even I see that Hawthorne is far too much the personality to be suitably preachable. Yes, you can certainly analyze literature and speculate on its spiritual and moral recommendations and perhaps parlay that into life pointers, but its tone will always interfere. Any decent piece of literature has a tone, a feel, an attitude that never fully gives way to any intentions. If Hawthorne has ever intended a moral in his tales, it can never be fully extracted from his tone--a tacit, steady and pervading mirth that waysides everything (including moral considerations) but itself. Hawthorne meticulously builds his pulpit seemingly to deliver some great lesson to the world, but once he scrambles up and regards the throng, he just dances about. Is this irreverent--is playing on the pulpit a dark commentary on the emptiness of looking for any direction or uncorrupted authority? No, no, its merely a show of Hawthorne’s reverence for play. Of course I think nothing could be wiser than that, but it does limit what I can do with his works. You can’t have full play with something already in the midst of play.

But words, just words alone, with their constrained and implication-less definitions are just begging for someone with the verve and slight wildness of a preacher (but sans the distraction of faith) to reintroduce them to the world. So I direct you away from your dictionary, away from your paltry and barren ideas of what charm means, away from charm-schools, charming young folk and charmers of all sorts, and towards a new conception of charm that may (hopefully) serve to replace beauty and truth and all those yearned things we’re supposed to have outgrown.

I don’t see much point in talking about what, or who, is charming. Not because its too subjective--I’m always willing to talk about subjective impressions as if they were facts. But how charm is experienced by the person who perceives it seems a lot more worthy a topic than any private riffing on what I find charming. Why do we find anything charming? How are we charmed? I started to think about charm because it seemed that Hawthorne’s profound effect on me is because of how charmed he seemed by humankind. Even in his treatment of his most (by his own admission) dull characters, Hawthorne seems sort of lovingly amused at their foibles. To me, Hawthorne has a special sense for seeing charm in the seemingly unprepossessing. He was so aware of this talent for being charmed that he challenged himself, in his short sketch “The Old Apple Dealer,” to find something appealing in an old, colorless apple merchant he spots in a train terminal. By the end of this sketch, Hawthorne has charmed himself into believing that this subdued figure is chock full of enough universe to inspire “tome after tome.” But part of Hawthorne’s special sense is that he could see that in anyone, given enough observation.

Charm is dependant on relishing nuance--a tone of voice, an oddity of gesture, a curious phrasing and qualities equally minute. But it isn’t dependent on so-called positive qualities. We may find someone charming because of their good looks or wit, but his or her vulnerabilities and flaws might stir the same feeling. Making such use of detail--good and bad---seems the most serious type of appreciation. I’ve always preferred the feeling of being charmed to thinking that someone is beautiful or good, because those feelings are more ego-driven. A good person will do right by me, and beauty pleases me aesthetically. A charming person, however, promises nothing to the beholder. Yes, I may remain enchanted, but my welfare or pleasure isn’t absolute or paramount when I’m charmed. Because I might be charmed by a combo of weakness, mischief, innocence, and wit in another person, my transfixion is probably likewise paradoxical. It isn’t all based on what I want or some ideal of mine, and it may not even be safe. It is a more reckless appreciation, and therefore a fuller one.

But Monica---someone might interject--couldn’t you just be talking about love here? What the hell? To which I respond--No, its different than falling in love. It calls for less from you. When you start falling in love, suddenly you’re called upon to examine your feelings--check and re-check that it is indeed love, contemplate what to do about it , review past loves to notice or deny any holding patterns, display your feelings in some difficult gesture, steel your self against rejection, etc etc, All that shit gets so heavy handed! The half-conscious and delicately wrought sense of charm is utterly different than the heady and insistant feeling of love. Charm doesn’t demand that you run-though some checklist of hysteria when you see it.

Charm is preferable to love because it has more interesting spiritual applications. We can’t really hope to love the world, nor can we really, honestly, expect god to love us. Not because we’re sinners, and not because the world is so awful, but because love wouldn’t do us, or the world, justice. Love is too absolute, too much an end in itself. If god were to love us, he wouldn’t really need to appreciate us. He wouldn’t need to delight in our nuances, he wouldn’t need to feel affection for our weakness, he wouldn’t need to be charmed by us at all. He could just radiate this one-note ‘love’ over us and leave it at that. Whereas a charmed god would allow himself to be enchanted by his creation--he wouldn’t simply check in on us to see if we need more love or need to be punished a little by less. He would watch us for our dear little foibles! I would rather have a powerless god who appreciated us this way rather than an omni-everything god rendering the world featureless in his glaring “love.