Fortune cookies no longer contain fortunes. Tucked inside the sugary shells are slips of paper printed with platitudes. I carry one such slip in my wallet, salvaged from a forgotten meal at least a decade ago: “Four basic premises of writing: clarity, brevity, simplicity, and humanity.” Neither fortune nor platitude, the advice packs more writerly wisdom than The Elements of Style. The shift from fortune to platitude, however, is disappointing and hints at a certain weak-minded, authoritarian streak among fortune-cookie writers and perhaps in the larger culture as well. Some of us, encountering a cliché, ignore it and leave the room.
Another reaction to
platitudes is possible: amusement. It’s always funny when someone emits a cliché
in the solemn tones used by Lincoln at Gettysburg. As in, “It is what it is,” a
contemporary bit of nonsense. Tom Disch agrees in his poem “Dueling Platitudes”:
“Because it is an
imperative voiced
in the accents of
ancestors
otherwise
unremembered,
“Gather ye rosebuds while
ye may
carries a proverbial force
that
makes us pay attention.
“Only the dead may address
us as ‘ye.’
But where are these
rosebuds?
Are they cheap as the hay
“We’re to make while the
sun shines?
What
penalties and fines
can we expect to pay
“If we’re caught in the
act of gathering
someone else’s rosebuds?
Ancestral voices disagree
“On these issues, and we
must choose
our authorities carefully;
one false step and there
is
“A piper to pay, and who
knows how much
a piper requires
when the fat’s in the
fire?
“Eat, drink, and be merry:
okay,
but will you still love me
when I'm old and gray?
“Which brings us to the
Middle Way,
another
idea
old as those hills
“Where rosebuds are rare
as a day
in June and pipers play
another tune
“Love’s old sweet song,
maybe,
or
other golden oldies
from the age of the Golden
Mean.
“Songs are seldom what
they seem;
the sirens who charm us
may suddenly scream
“Rape!, and words can harm
us
as brutally as sticks and
stones.
It depends on our tone.
“A queen who tells us to
eat cake
may be making
a big mistake,
But the same advice from
our corner baker
is par for the course,
not grounds for divorce.
“All adages are relative;
each
will have its season.
So dare to eat your peach,
My friend, but keep it
within reason.”
I count at least fifteen clichés/platitudes in Disch’s sixteen stanzas, including those coined
by Robert Herrick, James Russell Lowell and T.S. Eliot, which, of course, are low-hanging fruit.
[Disch’s poem was published in the Autumn 1986 issue of Grand Street and collected in About the Size of It (Anvil Press, 2007).]
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