Find Your There and Go There

Somebody is living on this beach.

~ David Markson, Wittgenstein’s Mistress

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Last week, I tapped into my bookseller powers to sneak into a Fran Lebowitz event in St. Paul. Her format is a kind of town hall of curmudgeonliness: for a half-hour, she chats with an interviewer; then, for an hour, she takes questions shouted from the audience. You could make it a drinking game, waiting for the familiar quips. Lebowitz is, after all, a kind of stand-up comic with a catalogue of signature jokes; hearing them repeatedly, and having them land repeatedly, has a way of reminding you what you care about.

One I’d heard before but struck me anew was the routine about the prohibitions against smoking indoors: “What do you call a bunch of people smoking and drinking in a bar? The history of art.” This kind of nostalgia is always romantic, of course, and generally not very helpful in changing anyone’s mind. One thinks of the sober artists, the disabled artists, the asthmatic artists — those not pictured around the smoky, dingy table with Lebowitz and Warhol and Hujar and so on in all the old photos. But this doesn’t mean, to adopt Stein’s phrase, that there was no there there. Certainly this group had conversations and disagreements as they smoked their throats to gravel. Certainly they shared ideas and supported one another, even if resentfully. More importantly, they had a boundary, and felt more comfortable taking a risk within a contained, controlled environment. Another way to say this, I suppose, is that they shared a context, which is, in a way, what Stein’s there amounts to.

Lebowitz’s smoky bar conjured another there that made an impression on me, a few winters ago, when I watched Peter Jackson’s Get Back, an enthrallingly, envelopingly tedious documentary about the end of The Beatles, which came at the height of their talent. I’d had zero intentions of watching this — it’s eight hours long, after all — but my husband threw it on while I was polishing silver.¹ In the first hour I was hooked. I enjoy most of their music, but I can take or leave The Beatles,² and have never felt altogether tempted by Beatles content. But I don’t think Get Back is really about the band at all so much as what it’s like to create something, to collaborate, with an almost uncanny ease — to share a form of genius. At the same time, Linda McCartney is there snapping what we recognize as now-famous photographs, while Yoko Ono busies herself with one form of art after another.³ What Get Back captures is one of the most artistically significant theres in the history of music: a group of artists whose early maturity has pushed them in different directions, but all brought together to fulfill a contract on a deadline.

I’ve had a few theres in my life. Maybe the most fateful was going to the same bar every Tuesday night in the mid-aughts. Their rotation was an open mic and a poetry slam every other week. The show usually ended around eleven, involved a lot of talking and patio smoking and hanging around afterward as everyone sobered up enough to drive, and then we usually went somewhere else. I was 21 and didn’t drink and could do things like follow poets around an emptied out city and go to bed at three in the morning and wake up for work at six. Showing up every week was how I began to build my life, seeing the same people until we all became familiar to each other. And of course it was a place to talk about poetry, even if slam wasn’t exactly what I had in mind for myself. And while this is all very analog, I don’t want to discount the digital theres I’ve been to, like Xenith — a zine and forum that nurtured my early writing and where I met inexplicably talented young writers across the world, some of whose poems I still think of to this day (“so far life is like the roll of film which melted to my dashboard”). This was all nearly twenty years ago but I’m still in touch with several of these writers, and we check in with each other now and then. The phrase is made for a website like this: You had to be there.

This specter of the there, in the Lebowitz joke, brought me back to the urgency of community, of finding out what you can do for those around you, those close to you, those with whom you share some form of context. These communities are there for us in a way that so much is not — national politics, say, or the swiss cheese morality of certain New York Times columnists, or ad-hungry social media platforms, or influencers and the scented candles they’re hawking, or Substack newsletters like this one, or food delivery apps, or whatever else we tend to devote time to day after day without receiving any devotion in return. This isn’t to say that all of these things are unhealthy or ethically dubious (though some of them are), but it is to point out how they aren’t there; and as this one-way attention accumulates it becomes, if I may, a pervasive therelessness. This might be the present tense version of what I’ve come to think of as futurelessness, but instead of looking ahead and seeing nothing, we look around us and see nobody, not even ourselves. This is the loneliness Arendt talks about as the enabling factor in totalitarian life: “Loneliness shows itself most sharply in company with others… What makes loneliness so unbearable is the loss of one’s own self which can be realized in solitude, but confirmed in its identity only by the trusting and trustworthy company of my equals. In this situation, man loses trust in himself as the partner of his thoughts… Self and world, capacity for thought and experience are lost at the same time.” To live in therelessness is to lose all trust, even in yourself.

While it’s possible to find community on social media, the fact that those communities are protected and strengthened by taking them off main betrays social media as a thereless place, and parasocial behavior generally as a thereless activity — in neither do we find support, only vulnerability, which invites us to harden ourselves, contract our curiosity, and disqualify our peers from consideration or compassion. What this reveals is the will at work in the architecture of social media. In a community, the will of all involved isn’t necessarily aligned, but it is dialectical — you exert influence on one another, and you do this because you trust each other. On social media, that will is top-down, whether from one man (Twitter) or a bureaucracy (Meta). This is why Twitter has become so much worse; it now embodies (even aesthetically, like the painting in Dorian Gray’s attic) the will of its owner. And this is why Instagram feels so nihilistically banal; it reflects a kind of bureaucratic style, a no-one’s style that overrides each user’s will. A thereless place is one in which the will of its people is broken — which seems to me increasingly why the country itself feels hostile, unwelcoming, and fatalistic.⁴

This is also why environments or communities that foster creativity, that challenge me to do something, feel like such remedies to this general despair: to make art, to wield style, is to exert one’s will upon the world. The efficacy of this in times of political crisis is, of course, a constant subject of debate — as it should be. Art is useless and utility cannot be the universal metric. But it doesn’t have to even be about art. These place-times I’ve mentioned are what’s made a difference in my own life, but art is only one way to have a will; and artistic circles or communities are only one way to will collectively. Whoever helps you feel as though you’re adding something to the world, and whoever, simultaneously, you help feel the same way — that’s your there, that’s your place to go.

All of this is another way of saying what I’ve always tried to say — especially to myself, as I need constant reminders — and that is: Pay attention to what gives you a sense of agency, and limit or avoid that which makes you feel powerless. None of us would be where we are today if the majority of Americans felt they had any agency over their own lives — which isn’t to say they never had the agency (it turns out that they had enormous, catastrophic agency all along), only that they felt otherwise. This perception of agency is itself a kind of trust, a trust in one’s ability to make an alteration in one’s life or in the world. This is why autocrats dismantle institutions, violate norms, engineer disinformation, and mutilate language; all of these are built on a sense of trust, of mutual agreement. They are contractual, and the autocrat violates all contracts. To rebuild these contracts, there has to be trust; and for there to be trust, there has to be some mutual or dialectical sense of will, of influence given and received. This activity is what a there can do, and why thereless places will only continue to deplete the general will and disempower those who might otherwise change the world.

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1. I tried writing this in seven different ways but there’s no way to say “while I was polishing silver” without sounding like an enemy of the people, but rest assured I polish silver antifascistly.

2. Similar to “What is the Super Bowl?” one of my favorite ways to irritate people over 60 is to ask, “Who are The Beatles?”

3. Not bothering anyone or interrupting or suggesting much of anything, it should be said.

4. For what it’s worth, I’ve already deactivated Bluesky. I don’t see a foreseeable use for social media — including Substack notes, which I still use — that doesn’t ultimately funnel more influence and control to what Sue Halpern recently called “the tech autocracy.”