Flattery as sloth and therefore aggression

I am reminded recently of a quote I had read as a young adult, fresh out of high school, and listening religiously to the Indigo Girls for lessons on how to approach the path before me. I’m an obsessive reader of album liner notes: in the liner notes of one Indigo Girls album is printed a quote by Marge Piercy. I have never really been able to get into her work, and at the time, at the age of 19, the quote struck me as trite. Today, I get it: “High energy doesn’t mean ‘fast’. High energy has to do with heart.”

Is it possible to vest heart into each of the numerous activities we fill our schedules with? If we’re moving so fast we can hardly think – and I mean contemplate – until we are too exhausted to enjoy the fruits of our labor, is there room for heart?

When we’re furiously busy working, or stacking our c.v.s, or simply ‘keeping busy’, we sometimes employ words to serve as surrogate for actual feelings. We take cues from society on modes of affectionate behavior, such as paying another a compliment, then crank up the volume. Flattering is often confused for complimenting; they are not the same. Flattery always superfluous: High energy, as Marge Piercy puts it, has to do with heart. What we lack in heart, we will make up with words, cheap ones and too many of them. It’s slothful. In this way, we can see that it’s actually a form of aggression. It’s not possible for one to be human and indifferent. We can only be either loving or aggressing. There is no in-between. For the flatterer, words have come to mean more that action; they have forgotten that words signify reality and that it’s the mere words that are the substance.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that the flatterer is unloving and loathing. Rather it means that the flatterer is riddled with doubt, doubts about meaning, the meaning of things, “things” such as people and deeds. And because people and deeds are contingent to Life, they have doubts of the meaning of Life, therefore. They have lost faith in meaningfulness. And Love is the only meaning.