Harebrained, Urgent Joy

07 Jul, 2024

In a 1959 essay on Jackson Pollock, Frank O’Hara took a brief sidestep to remark about Action Painting that it

does have qualities of passion and lyrical desperation, unmasked and uninhibited, not found in other recorded eras; it is not surprising that faced with universal destruction, as we are told, our art should at last speak with unimpeded force and unveiled honesty to a future which may well be nonexistent, in a last effort of recognition which is the justification of being.

Pollock’s works of this nature… are painfully beautiful celebrations of what will disappear, or has disappeared already, from this world, of what may be destroyed at any moment.

O’Hara notes that in these works of the artist that might be considered Action Painting, “The urgency of [Pollock’s] joy” is “great.”¹

Maybe it was the phrase “the urgency of his joy” that added something to what might otherwise have been a standard plea to come to our senses and do everything we could to keep from completely obliterating ourselves. If it may well disappear, O’Hara seems to have Pollock thinking, let’s get in as much beautiful ecstasy as we can while we can. The destruction we expect may not come, in which case, the remnants of today’s joy might be picked up by the next generation and revived. And if it’s to be total extermination after all, we’ve at least made our protest and our irrepressible gladness crystal clear.

There’s something not quite right, though, about the concept of “urgent joy,” which sounds like a situation in which a frantic element has leaked into the pure happiness of the moment to make our celebration less sincere, an attempt to convince ourselves that instead of being seized by terror, we’re determined, resolutely positive, if not about the situation itself, then at least our reaction to it.

Thirteen when the Berlin Wall came down, by the time I’d developed an understanding of the atomic bomb and nuclear winters, the old Duck and Cover cartoon and its accompanying jingle had become sort of a kitschy joke;² the Cuban Missile Crisis was nothing but a distant near-miss, a nonevent that provided background fodder for well-meaning family entertainment like Quantum Leap and its time-traveling physicist trying to right past wrongs.³ It’s not that our truck with things nuclear wasn’t and isn’t still a present fear; Chernobyl in 1986 reminded us, as did Fukushima in 2011, that all the arms treaties in the world could only do so much, and the Putin of today, with his free and easy use of nuclear threats, is very aware that The Bomb and its contemporary variants are still vivid perils. But doom-laden atomic threats have become something that we live with, and the lucky fact that we haven’t blown each other to smithereens seems to lull us into thinking that we won’t.

But I’m guessing those thoughts O’Hara offered on Action Painting, with their inclusion of that bit about urgent joy, hit home in a peculiar way thanks to the peculiar surroundings I was in this week while reading them. Ever since my first Fourth of July in my new neighborhood, circa three years ago, I resolved never again to be at home between the third and fifth of said month, when something like an absurd, unpoliced village carnival breaks out, culminating in a twenty-four-hour-plus continual release of frustration, celebration, and belligerence through the detonation in alleys, streets, and backyards of what must total in the tens of thousands of dollars of explosives. Since then, I’ve waited out the chaos at a friend’s place, where the revelry is more subdued.

That respite, though, has become compromised by Chicago’s welcoming of NASCAR into its streets for two days’ worth of cars blasting through a central portion of the city. In my temporary location, a couple of blocks away from much of the madness, I’m treated to a strange buzz every few minutes as the pack makes its way through a part of the course. It’s at least less bothersome, noise-wise, than the annual Air and Water Show, in which fighter jets burn off untold amounts of fuel flying between buildings and, while probably causing some level of lasting damage to your hearing, giving you the safest possible example of what it might feel like to realize you’re about to be strafed.

The fireworks, the cars, the planes: for a city that has a “climate action plan” whose “goals set a course to reduce the city's carbons [sic] emissions 62% by 2040,” the environmental impacts of these shenanigans makes said plan seem like nothing more than greenwashing.⁴ Here I am in a part of the US that actually doesn’t engage in displays of climate change denial—turning around and making its apparent confidence in scientific reporting meaningless, setting it all aside when dollar signs start popping up from entertainment providers whose source of fun cannot but be driven by a huge waste of fossil fuel. Faced with this idiotic banquet, it’s pretty difficult to believe there’s any hope that we as a planet will ever get ourselves together and avoid our own, and our world’s, destruction. The little bones we’re thrown by government—an admittedly welcome municipal composting program, for example—seem like no more, given this embrace of ecological improvidence, than that duck and cover action plan, which assured kids in 1952 that “even a newspaper can save you from a bad [nuclear] burn.”⁵

I get the sense that atomic-era propaganda films were aimed at children who were still at an age (and maybe in a time and place) when they could be convinced that there were things they could do to stave off the worst of a terrible situation. If all that advice was really just a pack of lies, it at least kept the nation’s children from falling prey to bouts of mass panic. What the grown-ups of the era made of it all, I’m not sure—but by the time O’Hara wrote his essay in 1959, with tourists still pouring in to Nevada to witness nuclear tests up close, the adult citizenry was treated to another film on ways of protecting yourself from fallout.⁶ (Said means included observing the dust that had collected on a plate set outside, as well as stacking lots of sandbags, or if those were absent, books, around you in your basement.) The bomb still presented things to be worried about—but again, the film alleged, there were measures you could take to get through it.

I get the sense that this sort of patent bullshit has seeped its poison over the years into our collective consciousness, so that where climate change is concerned, all the well-founded entreaties to take public transportation, or not use plastic bags, or change out your incandescent lightbulbs for compact fluorescents, have sounded as useless and disingenuous, when unpaired with massive government action, as hiding under a picnic blanket when a nuclear blast goes off. And unlike the kids we thought could be reassured in the Fifties by plans to curl up in a ball and hide, today’s children seem to realize, and to be suffering all the depression and anxiety that come with that realization, that theirs is “a future which may well be nonexistent.”⁷Any sympathetic parent might be infected as well with that despair—but what to do about it, when the powers-that-be seem incapable of and unwilling to left a finger—even encouraging the very fossil-fueled practices they’re telling us need to be brought to an end?

Given the fact that most of us aren’t artists or writers or musicians—aren’t capable of Pollock’s and other Action Painters’ ability to summon and portray all their desperate joy, and maybe experience just a bit of sanity-saving catharsis in doing so—it feels as if all the fireworks and stunt displays are the only last hurrah, resigned or exuberant, we have on hand. When in doubt or fear, in other words, Americans will resort to the only thing it seems we’ve ever truly and consistently been great at: in one way or another, shutting our eyes to solutions and, “in a last effort of recognition,” just blowing shit up.

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