The Morality and Aesthetics of Cursing

The title of this post sounds like an actual essay.  As always, sorry to disappoint.

Both this post and the next post will be about the play that I just finished writing, of which I mentioned a few days ago.  Of course, this means that the play better be good, or else I'll feel rather dumb for wasting my time on three posts about a play that smells like rotting flesh.  Yikes, that's an unnecessarily gruesome image.  Here I want to talk about what the purpose of cursing is.

Personally, I do not swear.  I have gotten into the terrible habit of saying, "God damnit," which in a way is worse than using curse words, at least within my belief system, but I'm working on it.  The reason I do not swear is that I see no purpose to it whatsoever.  Seriously.  My poetry professor used to always say that italics make no sense in a poem because if you want to emphasize a word or phrase there are other more worthwhile and consistent techniques to do so.  I've come to agree with him fully.  If you want to emphasize your anger, frustration, or shock, or want to show how cool or rebellious you are, then a little curse word should be your last option.  There are numerous other, and better, ways to be who you want to be or to be the emotion that you hope to express.  Namely, you can simply be, in all of who you are, what you are trying to be.  It's that simple.  Thus there is no point in cursing.

The pointlessness of cursing goes a bit further when you believe in God or in the greatness of humanity.  Whenever people ask me why I don't drink alcohol they generally ask if it's for personal or religious reasons; after answering that I don't drink for both personal and religious reasons, some will then ask me what my religious reasons are.  At that point I respond, "If you believe in God then you wouldn't drink alcohol."  Then they say, "What in the world are you talking about?"  Quite simply, unless you drink alcohol only for the taste (which, of course, is never the original reason for why anyone drinks alcohol, so I don't think that anyone can say that their reason for drinking is for the taste), then you are drinking alcohol for a purpose that God should fill in your life.  Want to calm down?  Pray to God and you'll calm down.  Want to loosen up?  Pray to God asking to learn how to loosen up.  Et cetera et cetera.  God is taken out of the equation by drinking alcohol and that, in the religious context, is immoral.

Now you may either be ferociously arguing with me or wondering what alcohol has to do with cursing, or both.  To answer the latter question, however, I say again that instead of cursing one can simply be--be the emotion or person that cursing is meant to portray.  Like with alcohol, if we believe in God and curse instead of being--being through prayer and relationship with God, who can do all things, or so we say we believe--then cursing becomes immoral.  As far as I'm concerned there's no way around this.

As a writer of non-fiction I'll never curse, which is good since non-fiction is mostly what I write.  But as a writer of fiction I must ask whether or not there's ever a time when cursing can be a moral act, or at least an a-moral act.  Is it immoral for me to write, and ask others to say or read, curse words that I do not approve of?  Or can it be moral if the work promotes morality and religiosity?   These questions become pressingly pertinent because there is plenty of swearing in the play that I just finished.

The major reason for including swearing in my play is that one of the characters, and one of the scenes, would not be believable and would not feel real without swearing; and I believe that the play generally does at least point the way to some higher form of living.  So perhaps I have answered in favor of a-morality, but then I have only pushed the question into the field of aesthetics.  Indirectly we can ask whether it's necessary to swear to be funny, but more relevantly I want to ask whether a dose of reality makes a work of art real to the spectator.  Frankly, the answer is no: a good artist makes any work of art "real" to the spectator, no matter what the content.  Besides, as Oscar Wilde said, "Art does not imitate life; life imitates art."  Why, then, must I have my drunk character swearing left and right?

I don't know.  That's it.  I don't know.  Maybe the answer is that we sometimes must seek greatness without a defensible explanation.  But I don't like that answer.  It goes against everything I believe.  Or maybe the answer is that, when we hope to understand why we do what we do, we can only answer, "I don't know."  And that's the life of a writer.

Charlie Kaufman and Richard Kelly

Remaining immersed in various forms of art is a good idea for any writer or artist.  As I've said before, I think, a writer cannot hope to create anything worthwhile, or at least anything fulfilling his potential, if he writes in a vacuum.  A writer needs external stimulation so that his skill and imagination constantly receive new content.  Writing always will assure that a writer's skill and imagination do not rust, but the external stimulation assure that his writing does not repeat the same boring formulations over and over again.  I wish I could insert a footnote here because repeating is not necessarily a bad thing: if a writer has a core principle, belief, creed, or whatever, every word will be a repetition despite new themes and characters and ideas, and that is good; but repetition otherwise is the worst.  Boring repetition produces one-hit wonders, or worse, no-hit-wonders-that-weren't-actually-ever-wonderful. 

Some of my posts have been about the things that I read for that stimulation but I have yet to discuss what I watch for that stimulation.  Like with everything I do, I much prefer stimulation that won't also dumb me down.  Pure entertainment is good every now and then, but a) I do my best not to make it a habit and, b) there are plenty of sources of pure entertainment that are also clever, or at least not ridiculous in some way.  So Twilight, or anything similar, is out because it's silly and encourages silly notions and behavior, especially in romantic relationships; most reality shows are also out because they aren't interesting, at least not anymore when the whole world seems occupied by "reality" shows, often subject you to various levels of stupidity, and prey on the listlessness and typical American desire to be unthinking, lazy, obnoxious, and self-serving; and anything that contains too much violence, especially comedies where violence has no place (violence is NOT funny, yet the trend nowadays is to include violence as often as possible in comedy films), usually shut me off.

What, then, do I watch?  Well, I'll point you to two film writers/directors whose films should be seen and enjoyed by all.

First of all, I think that Scorsese is the best director out there right now.  I can't comment on Kubrick or Hitchcock or any other American director working primarily before 1980 because, honestly, I have not seen many American films prior to that date.  I'm only 25, for goodness sakes.  I'm working on it, but still, so far most films made prior to 1980 that I've seen are foreign.  Don't ask me why that is, but that's been my habit heretofore.

Ok, Richard Kelly.  Based on the rules of good literature I should mention Kaufman first because I listed him first in the title, but I decided that I'd rather leave him for last because he's so brilliant.  Richard Kelly is perhaps most famous for Donnie Darko.  As with all his films, he both wrote and directed the film with the scary bunny on the cover.  Without question Donnie Darko is my favorite movie of all-time and may always be for its themes developed in a mind-bending way.  Other films you might know him by are The Box and Southland Tales.  Each film is much like the others in that Kelly likes to play with your head, create a sense of mystery, and throw in a bunch of symbols and things that he himself admits he doesn't know the meaning of.  I think of the poet Dylan Thomas saying that he wrote poetry by placing words together that sounded good with the others and worried about the meaning later.  That's the type of poetry I love most and I guess it's also the kind of film that I love most.  I am thrilled with entertaining images but my mind is always working making connections or simply allowing itself to be provoked.

Charlie Kaufman is perhaps the most brilliant writer to enter the film industry.  Usually the director deserves most of the credit, if not all, for the quality of a film, but Kaufman reverses that trend by only screenwriting.  You might know him for a lot of films: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Being John Malkovich, or Confessions of a Dangerous Mind (which includes one of my favorite actors as the main character, Sam Rockwell).  But his best films, in my humble opinion, that absolutely must be seen are Adaptation and Synecdoche, New York.  I can't really describe these films except to say that they are equally entertaining as the other films but far more intellectual, unique, and just plain brilliant.  Really I can't urge the viewing of these latter two films enough, particularly Adaptation.  Watch all his films, though, and your life will never be the same.  Seriously.  Kaufman's writing is so creative that you, like the characters in his films, will not be able to think of reality the same way again.  Indeed, all of his films question what makes up reality, what makes up our identity, what is the meaning of life, without ever asking any of these questions as in one of those totally uninteresting films whose sole purpose is to ask some lofty question but lacks any aesthetic qualities.  No, Kaufman is like a philosopher who writes novels: rocking your mind and you don't even know it.  You are too caught up in the characters and story and what will happen next to realize that the texture of life is being re-molded. 

Of course, you can watch a Kaufman or Kelly film and simply think afterward, "Wow, that was good," or simply, "That was good, I liked it," and move on.  Or you might ask some questions about the film hoping that you can make sense of it, and then either make sense of it and move on or conclude that it doesn't make sense and that's stupid.  Well, for one thing, I don't think it's stupid to include symbols left and right that don't necessarily have a singular focus, as long as it's not overdone or too obvious or doesn't go anywhere.  Therefore I don't think we should simply "make sense" of a piece of art or demand that art make sense.  If the art is art, then it is art.  Easy as pie.  And if the art is art, then all you can ask of it is that it brings you aesthetic joy or mental provocation.  Both of these, but particularly mental provocation, are what I look for in the things that I watch.

Obviously, being a huge Boston sports fan (in the case of college sports, I'm a Big East fan, NOT a Boston College fan), so I watch a lot of sports.  Otherwise, though, most of what I watch is intended to experience art that is art that can stimulate my mind for better writing.  Even if I weren't a writer, however, my tastes would be the same because I hate the prospect of a dumbed-down society like that in Wall-E, which unfortunately seems inevitable, even with my great genius entering the world.