Love and Quirkiness
A Metamodern Appreciation
of Interior Freedom
Metamodernism … is motivated by a need to safeguard the individual’s interior, subjective Felt Experience against the potential degradations of postmodern ironic relativism and modernist reductionism…
Greg Dember, Say Hello to Metamodernism
Quirky offers an alternative to the irony vs. earnestness schism by presenting characters who are heroically weird. Characters who, through their own eccentricity, reveal something simultaneously outside of the norm and universal in the way it gives access to the kind of vulnerability that everybody experiences.
- Greg Dember, Say Hello to Metamodernism
In Say Hello to Metamodernism!, Greg Dember identifies eleven aesthetic methods through which the metamodern spirit can express itself, recovering and protecting the primacy and irreducibility of felt experience. They are:
On other pages in Open Horizons, I have explored meta-cuteness, oscillation, normcore, and the closely related practice of braiding. On this page, I turn to the quirky. I want to link it with the notion of interior freedom, by which I mean the freeedom to receive and respond to the world non-compulsively, responding in a spirit of love. Thus understood, interior freedom comes by degrees; we can be more or less inwardly free. And it can be spotty. We can be inwardly free in one moment but not in the next. Still, it is a state of consciousnes and a way of being in the world that has been important in many of the world's spiritual traditions and that has a uniquely metamodern field. It includes a freedom from an excessive preoccupation with social convention and a freedom to be wide and spacious in one's consciousness: to be open and, so I suggest, to be quirky.
Two Meanings of Quirky
There are two meanings to the word quirky in the Oxford English Dictionary which seem to the point:
"Characterized by certain unexpected, odd, or unusual traits; idiosyncratic, eccentric; peculiar, unusual."
"Characterized by or full of twists, turns, or flourishes."
Both meanings are important, but the second is especially congenial to a process point of view. People can seem and be quirky, not simply by virtue of unusual 'traits' but also because they are full of twists and turns. The surprise us.
The Heroically Weird
In the quotation above, Dember speaks of quirky characters as "heroically weird." Their heroism may lie in achievements of one sort or another, but it also consists in their interiority their indifference to social expectation and 'acceptable' norms along with their capacityi to be vulnerable. There is a heroism in the very act of being different,
For my part, having majored in English literature in college, I think of two examples from Shakespeare: Falstaff and Bottom. Both were true to themselves as they broke convention. Falstaff, gloriously excessive in appetite, wit, and self-invention, refuses conventional ideals of military honor, bodily discipline, and respectable conduct. Deeply flawed but irrepressibly alive, the flip side of his refusal to conform is humor, imaginative freedom, and a way of life unmistakably his own. Bottom, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, is supremely confident in his abilities and almost entirely impervious to embarrassment, even after being given the head of an ass. He does not overcome his weirdness; he simply inhabits it—and, in doing so, becomes lovable.
The "heroic weirdness" of quirky people has two sides: their behavior and their interiority, which is revealed in, but also more than, their behavior. In the latter respect their behavior reveals something universal: the inwardly felt character of experience as lived from a first-person perspective. Their eccentricity is not simply decorative or amusing; it is a revelation of something playful, imaginative, and sincere. We are thus reminded that we ourselves are quirky in our way. As Dember puts it: "Characters who, through their own eccentricity, reveal something simultaneously outside of the norm and universal in the way it gives access to the kind of vulnerability that everybody experiences."
The Spacious Soul
What is this vulnerability? Above I said that it is a vulnerablity to social expectation. But I think it is more than this. It is also a strength to be vulnerable. In process philosophy Bernard Loomer speaks of a soul with size: a capacious soul. He writes:
In Say Hello to Metamodernism!, Greg Dember identifies eleven aesthetic methods through which the metamodern spirit can express itself, recovering and protecting the primacy and irreducibility of felt experience. They are:
- Empathic Reflexivity (including Ceriello’s “Life-as-Movie”)
- The Narrative Double Frame (Eshelman’s Performatism)
- Oscillation Between Modern and Postmodern Dualities
- Quirky
- The Tiny (Metamodern Minimalism)
- The Epic (Metamodern Maximalism)
- Constructive Pastiche
- Ironesty
- Normcore
- Over-projection (Anthropomorphizing)
- Meta-cute
On other pages in Open Horizons, I have explored meta-cuteness, oscillation, normcore, and the closely related practice of braiding. On this page, I turn to the quirky. I want to link it with the notion of interior freedom, by which I mean the freeedom to receive and respond to the world non-compulsively, responding in a spirit of love. Thus understood, interior freedom comes by degrees; we can be more or less inwardly free. And it can be spotty. We can be inwardly free in one moment but not in the next. Still, it is a state of consciousnes and a way of being in the world that has been important in many of the world's spiritual traditions and that has a uniquely metamodern field. It includes a freedom from an excessive preoccupation with social convention and a freedom to be wide and spacious in one's consciousness: to be open and, so I suggest, to be quirky.
Two Meanings of Quirky
There are two meanings to the word quirky in the Oxford English Dictionary which seem to the point:
"Characterized by certain unexpected, odd, or unusual traits; idiosyncratic, eccentric; peculiar, unusual."
"Characterized by or full of twists, turns, or flourishes."
Both meanings are important, but the second is especially congenial to a process point of view. People can seem and be quirky, not simply by virtue of unusual 'traits' but also because they are full of twists and turns. The surprise us.
The Heroically Weird
In the quotation above, Dember speaks of quirky characters as "heroically weird." Their heroism may lie in achievements of one sort or another, but it also consists in their interiority their indifference to social expectation and 'acceptable' norms along with their capacityi to be vulnerable. There is a heroism in the very act of being different,
For my part, having majored in English literature in college, I think of two examples from Shakespeare: Falstaff and Bottom. Both were true to themselves as they broke convention. Falstaff, gloriously excessive in appetite, wit, and self-invention, refuses conventional ideals of military honor, bodily discipline, and respectable conduct. Deeply flawed but irrepressibly alive, the flip side of his refusal to conform is humor, imaginative freedom, and a way of life unmistakably his own. Bottom, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, is supremely confident in his abilities and almost entirely impervious to embarrassment, even after being given the head of an ass. He does not overcome his weirdness; he simply inhabits it—and, in doing so, becomes lovable.
The "heroic weirdness" of quirky people has two sides: their behavior and their interiority, which is revealed in, but also more than, their behavior. In the latter respect their behavior reveals something universal: the inwardly felt character of experience as lived from a first-person perspective. Their eccentricity is not simply decorative or amusing; it is a revelation of something playful, imaginative, and sincere. We are thus reminded that we ourselves are quirky in our way. As Dember puts it: "Characters who, through their own eccentricity, reveal something simultaneously outside of the norm and universal in the way it gives access to the kind of vulnerability that everybody experiences."
The Spacious Soul
What is this vulnerability? Above I said that it is a vulnerablity to social expectation. But I think it is more than this. It is also a strength to be vulnerable. In process philosophy Bernard Loomer speaks of a soul with size: a capacious soul. He writes:
“By size, I mean the stature of your soul, the range and depth of your love, your capacity for relationships. I mean the volume of life you can take into your being and still maintain your integrity and individuality; the intensity and variety of outlook you can entertain in the unity of your being without feeling defensive or insecure. I mean the strength of your spirit to encourage others to become freer in the development of their diversity and uniqueness. I mean the power to sustain more complex and enriching tensions. I mean the magnanimity of concern to provide conditions that enable others to increase in stature.”
—Bernard Loomer, “S-I-Z-E Is the Measure,” in Religious Experience and Process Theology (1976)
I suggest that the strength of the heroically weird person partakes of this kind of spaciousness, especially three of its qualities: “the volume of life you can take into your being and still maintain your integrity and individuality”; "the intensity and variety of outlooks you can entertain within the unity of your feeling without becoming defensive or insecure"; and “the power to maintain more complete and enriching tensions.”
When we encounter a heroically weird person, see one on a screen, read about one in literature, or imagine ourselves as heroically weird, these three qualities often come to mind. We sense a wideness in their souls, and we find it attractive.
Love and Quirkiness
Dember is especially interested in how the quirky is exemplified in works of art, particularly, though not exclusively, in film and literature. I want to extend his insight in a somewhat different direction by asking how the quirky might also find expression in Whitehead’s philosophy and in spirituality as understood within a process context.
If we think “with Whitehead,” we recognize that something like love lies at the heart of the universe. It is not all-powerful or all-controlling, but it is spacious in the sense described above. It contains multiplicity, embraces a wide variety of outlooks, and encourages others to become freer in developing their own diversity and uniqueness.
If we are trapped in postmodern irony, however, we cannot easily confess belief in this cosmic love without embarrassment. We may find ourselves needing to speak with what Dember calls ironesty: confessing our belief while also acknowledging that we know we may be wrong.
Raoul Eshelman, whom Dember cites in his discussion of the double frame, speaks of this kind of expression as performatism. On the one hand, there is an outer frame—here, a culture skeptical of any seemingly naïve belief in something like a cosmic love in which humans might participate. On the other hand, there is what Ceriello calls the “emotional logic” of believing in such love.
A person who believes in—or, better, trusts in—such love must “perform” that trust in the face of skeptical outsiders and also in the face of a skepticism the person has internalized. This performance may itself seem, at least to outsiders, “quirky,” prompting the response: How strange—and how naïve—to trust in something more than yourself, especially if you call it love.
In Process and Reality Whitehead speaks of this cosmic love as God, understood not as a ruler above or outside the universe but as the subjective unification of the universe itself: the universe gathered into a living self or soul whose body is the multiplicity of beings and events that compose it. On this view God is a "who" not a "what," but the "you-ness" of God includes the entire universe. Each actual entity is akin to a cell in God’s body. This does not mean that God controls the universe. It does mean that God loves the universe. The question then becomes: What does love mean?
Two Sides of Love
I suggest that it means at least two things, for us and for God. First, it means feeling the feelings of each and every actual entity on its own terms and for its own sake. Second, it means luring each entity, non-coercively, toward whatever richness of experience is possible for it, relative to the situation it faces. Love is both empathy and active influence, exercised for the sake of the beings who compose the universe.
In a Whiteheadian context, each actual entity is unique. It cannot be reduced to other entities, even though its inward experience is partly composed of its relations with them. A living being—or any enduring center of experience—is, as Charles Hartshorne puts it, a “compound individual”: a one composed of many, yet more than the many that compose it.
All of this means that loving others, loving ourselves, and thereby participating in the wider and deeper love at the heart of the universe require sensitivity to the sheer uniqueness of each person—to that person’s irreducible interiority. People who are quirky in a gentle way, innocently oblivious to the established norms of society and walking—or perhaps even marching—to the beat of their own drum, can therefore become prophetic catalysts. They invite those of us who may seem a little more “ordinary” to recognize and claim our own unique interiority, too.
Spirituality as Receptivity to the Quirky
This has implications for metamodern spirituality. In Say Hello to Metamodernism!, Dember draws on the work of his colleague Linda Ceriello to describe a particular kind of metamodern spirituality: the spirituality of people who identify as “spiritual but not religious,” or SBNR.
As Dember writes, building upon Ceriello's insights,
“Metamodern spirituality, with its insistence on valuing the individual, on-the-ground sense of self alongside whatever states of elevated consciousness are achieved through spiritual practice, departs from both the modernist (‘go higher!’) and postmodern (‘dissolve into a system’) aspects of the New Age. It also rebels against, or at least brackets to the side, the ‘snarky’ version of postmodernism’s contempt for the New Age, insisting on valuing felt experience, which may include mystical and other non-ordinary experiences that feel meaningful.
In this light, some attributes that Ceriello suggests distinguish the metamodern SBNR from the New Age are:
- “A focus on ground-level, day-to-day, ‘this-worldly’ concerns as much as or more than on attempts at transcending the world.
- “A fluidity of identity narratives, such that an SBNR doesn’t feel the need to choose between spiritual and secular affiliations.
- “Does not try to solve the ‘problem’ of the self by taking the self away.
- “Recognizes the extraordinary found in the ordinary, not just in the transcendent.
- “Extraordinary mystical states occurring for ordinary people being recognized and respected alongside those occurring for dedicated practitioners (monks and the like).
The connection with the quirky lies partly in this affirmation of ordinary, irreducible individuality. Spirituality need not require people to shed their peculiarities in order to approximate a single model of holiness, enlightenment, or transcendence. Their eccentricities—their distinctive ways of feeling, imagining, relating, and moving through the world—may themselves become vessels of spiritual significance. The quirky person can remind us that spiritual depth is found not only by rising above our particularity but also by inhabiting it more fully, gently, and honestly.
Admittedly, in this extended quotation from Dember’s book, he does not use the word “love.” Nor, perhaps, does Ceriello. Nevertheless, it seems to me that many people who identify as spiritual but not religious are implicitly, if not explicitly, drawn toward love—and perhaps toward a sense of cosmic love—as part of their spiritual orientation. For some, this may include believing that love is woven into the very fabric of the universe. But such belief is not necessary. In a Whiteheadian context, a person can participate in cosmic love without believing in it or naming it as such. Whenever people feel the feelings of others with care and respond by helping them realize whatever forms of richness are possible in their circumstances, they participate in the wider and deeper love at the heart of the universe. Belief may help some people recognize this participation, but it does not create it.
Mysticism
There may also be extraordinary forms of experience—mystical experiences—in which people encounter the cosmic dimension of this love in non-ordinary ways. Such experiences do not constitute the whole of mysticism. Mysticism includes many other kinds of experience as well: experiences of unity, luminous presence, sacred emptiness, profound beauty, communion with nature, intimate relation with a personal deity, or the quiet dissolution of familiar boundaries between self and world. It may also include encounters with spirits, ancestors, archetypes, angels, devils, deities, ghosts, animal presences, and other agencies or powers whose precise ontological status may remain uncertain. In the house of mysticism there are many rooms. (See Eight Forms of Mysticism in Open Horizons.)
Experiences of cosmic love are one form of mysticism, but not the only form. All have their reality, There is no need to say that a metamodern spirituality is overly focussed on mysticism in any of its forms, at the expense of being receptive to everyday life. As Dember puts it: "Metamodern spirituality, with its insistence on valuing the individual, on-the-ground sense of self alongside whatever states of elevated consciousness are achieved through spiritual practice." In metamodern spirituality, mysticism is 'alongside' everyday life. There is spirituality in communion with the ancestors, but also spiritualy in having lunch with a good friend.
Beyond the Spiritual but not Religious
I conclude with a word about people who are formally religious. I want to suggest that they, too, may be quirky by postmodern standards, and that their quirkiness has its own beauty, strength, vulnerability and integrity. On this Dember would fully agree, as evidence in his treatment of metamodern Christians.
People who identify as spiritual but not religious are not necessarily “quirky” by contemporary, secular (often but not always Western) standards. They have become, in many settings, quite typical. It does not require special courage to be "not religious" in many urban settings: Seattle, Beijing, London, or Paris.
A spirituality of quirkiness must therefore recognize the quirkiness not only of those who stand outside organized religion but also of those who identify with particular religious traditions. Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs, and others have their own distinctive ways of imagining, feeling, worshipping, and living. Their commitments may appear unusual—or even strange—to people outside their traditions, but their particularity deserves appreciation, too. The point is not to privilege the spiritual-but-not-religious over the religious. It is to recognize and honor the irreducible interiority and distinctive path of each person, including those whose spiritual lives are nourished by inherited rituals, communities, symbols, and stories. This capacity to see sincerity in others, and to respect it, even if they differ from whatever sincerity you might also find in yourself, is the hallmark of a spacious soul and, I believe, a quirky soul.
Love and Irony
Dember's approach to metamodernism includes irony. It is, he says, fun. In recommending a metamodern approach to life, he believes there is a place for humor, amusement, and irony - albeit in a say that makes space for inwardly felt sincerity.
Interior freedom can include irony and be enriched by it. In this sense, it can incorporate valuable aspects of postmodern culture. But irony is best practiced in a spirit of love rather than snarkiness. It is, in Dember’s language, ironest: ironic and honest at the same time.
And it is relational in spirit. Its honesty is not limited to one’s own inwardly felt experience; it is also attentive to the inwardly felt experiences of others. It sees and cares for the uniqueness of every soul, the dignity of each person, and the dignity of other living beings. Its irony is directed toward the common good: toward exposing pretension, cruelty, injustice, and false certainty without humiliating the people caught within them. It seeks liberation rather than superiority. It laughs with the world more than at it, helping to loosen the bonds of convention so that people—and other living beings—might become freer to flourish in their distinctive ways.
This conjunction of irony and sincerity is itself quirky. When enacted in a relational spirit, and in service to the common good, is an incarnation of something deep and wide within the universe. Something playful, fun, tender, and caring. Metamodern spirituality, however named, partakes of this tenderness.