In the waning gray of February, my wife (a practicing and powerful witch) began buying brightly colored corset belts and styling them with her corporate attire, abalone-framed glasses, and functional switchblade earrings. Around the same time, she bought a petticoat to increase the resting diameter of her skirts and dresses. “I am whimsy-maxing,” she proclaimed, dripping melting wax across an offering plate on our roof, shortly after the first time she styled one of her newest fits by spinning in the evening sun.
I’m going to write about whimsy a bit—which is a way of warning you, right out of the wormhole, that I’ll also be writing about love, which means I’ll be writing about her. Lucky you.
In light of her (prescient in a way too personal to talk about here) decision to bring whimsy into our lives in an intentional, sustained way, I’ve been thinking about what whimsy is.
whimsy gets a bit of a bad rap. Frivolous, cringy, saccharine, pointless. Some of the common words that get thrown around when you talk about whimsical things. Adam Roberts has a great piece on Pynchon’s “Against the Day” and contemporary fantasy and both’s relationship with whimsy. It’s also a great primer on some of the history and etymology of whimsy. Ultimately, though, it’s a call for experiences deeper than whimsy. “[whimsy] can be charming,” Roberts writes. “But only in the modern, disenchanted and diluted sense of that word. And it can be just as irksome.”
What makes whimsy feel so irksome? I think a lot of it comes from what is fundamentally a category error. Whimsy is a mode of being, rather than a mode of communication or presentation. When one performs whimsy, or receives whimsy as a kind of statement, it *is* irksome. I think this is essentially because one cannot perform whimsy in any meaningful sense.
whimsy, I think is best understood as an unselfconscious, purposeless sincerity.
Venkatesh Rao recently wrote about the importance of irony. For him, irony is the ability to hold ambiguities and multiple meanings (of words at the atomic level, of ideologies and hyperobjects at the planetary) at the same time. This is placed in (complicated) opposition to sincerity and authenticity, which demands that you say what you mean.
Irony allows you to talk about fundamentally ambiguous things and parts of reality without killing the thing you’re describing by insisting it’s one or the other. Sincerity, in this model, insists that things express exactly what they are. So when confronting the ambiguous, the dialectic, or anything that demands ambiguity or holding multiple truths simultaneously, only irony works
This gets it half right, I think.
Allowing ambiguous things to just be without enforcing a single final factual answer is also the primary function of whimsy, though.
And whimsy is a deeply sincere act because it has to be done unselfconsciously—for just itself.
Whitman, much more a whimsical poet than I think he gets credit for, holds it thusly:
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
whimsy is the ability to unself-consciously contradict yourself with complete sincerity.
I suspect self-conscious sincerity isn’t actually sincerity at all. It’s sentimentality. The wave function collapse model of sincerity only works if you view sincerity as a heuristic or communicative mode rather than an embodied receptive one.
To be fair. It’s very hard to capture or write about whimsy. In part, I suspect there’s a kind of observer effect happening where the second whimsy is, in any way, performed, it ceases to be whimsy. If it’s captured, recorded, or limned by the practitioner, it ceases to be a moment and way of being that existed for only itself. It becomes instrumentalized, and being driven by purpose isn’t very whimsical.
Wildlife photography practices and poetry are probably the only discursive modes that could reliably present whimsy, but even then, I’m not sure.
Sincerity, etymologically, comes from the Latin for “of one growth.” The problem is, if you’re using sincerity to say something, to do something, to convince someone, to entertain someone else, to describe, hell, even to seek truth, the act—the verb—the is automatically not “of one growth.” It’s coming then, from both the desire to communicate something or convince someone or do something and from the moment. And that’s not very whimsical.
If I’m circling an idea here, I think it’s that whimsy may be the only true way to practice sincerity. Because sincerity is not being “one thing”—a tree “of one growth” can be both branch and bark and sap and fruit and flower and shade and root and petal and leaf. Sincerity is just being. And whimsy is a mode of being that does not ask things to be anything—simple, complicated, useful—other than what they are.
whimsy is sincere being because it asks for nothing of reality but that it exist. whimsy insists on nothing from the world. Its activity is purely imaginative, which is to say non-extractive and undemanding.
whimsy is an experience of weightless, associative, sensate freedom that comes from pure receptiveness married to active imagination.
whimsy the word, doesn’t come from ‘whim’ like one (me, for instance) might think. It comes from a 16th-century term for playthings, toys, small, mostly useless devices: whim-whams. It was (maybe) related to the Scandinavian word for “to let one’s eyes wander.”
Whimsy is the art of doing nothing.
I loafe and invite my soul
I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.Whitman, Song of Myself
In a state of whimsy, one loafs and lets one’s eyes wander with ease.
Whimsy is about release, a letting go of the eye so as to give it (yourself!) freedom. When you let your eyes wander, you subsume yourself to your environment and allow it to move you.
whimsy treats the moment of joy (and its attendant setting) as a single playful instance of and for itself, not an object to or for something else. Sincerity isn’t a mode of investigating the world or generating truths. It’s a whim-wham. A toy. In its ideal, whimsical form, it’s a way of responding to the world’s reality without reducing it to some thing. I think, in short, it’s playing.
Playing with the world is a way of taking it less seriously, so you can actually hold it as it is. If you’ve ever been knee deep in the high-pile grass of a child’s playroom carpet, you know that true play can only happen with total sincerity.
Emily Dickinson writes (emphasis mine):
The Zeroes—taught us—Phosphorous—
We learned to like the Fire
By playing Glaciers—when a Boy—
And Tinder—guessed—by power
Of Opposite—to balance Odd—
If White—a Red—must be!
Paralysis—our Primer—dumb—
Unto Vitality!
The language of math and science—“zeroes”, “"phosphorous”, and “tinder”—suggests a discourse of certainty. But the “Primer” (the tool that actually teaches us) is the paralysis that arises from the playful experience of opposites. For Dickinson, in this poem, meaning emerges through absence and difference, not substance. The em-dashes so typical of Dickinson break and fragment the piece visually and sonically—“the cracks that let the light in”—create the very zeros, the absences, that generates understanding. The unresolved, often sensory experience of opposites creates meaning, and the way we experience and actually learn what things are is through “playing.” We play with glaciers to learn fire, because in play, things can contain their multitudes.
Nature is always playing in Dickinson:
A dew sufficed itself
And satisfied a leaf,
And felt, 'how vast a destiny!
How trivial is life!'
The sun went out to work,
The day went out to play,
But not again that dew was seen
By physiognomy.
Where every bird is bold to go,
And bees abashless play
The brooks laugh louder when I come,
The breezes madder play.
Wherefore, mine eyes, thy silver mists?
Wherefore, O summer's day?
Some say it is the spheres at play!
Some say that bright majority
Of vanished dames and men!
Meek at whose everlasting feet
A myriad daisies play.
The snow and he [the bluejay] are intimate;
I've often seen them play
When heaven looked upon us all
With such severity
Nature teaches us through play because nature “suffices itself.” It is all it needs. Nature is often whimsical for the same reason it is sublime, which is the same reason it is terrifying, which is the same reason it is beautiful. It’s entirely unself-conscious and uninteresting in anything other than its own being.
whimsy is the root of play. And playing pretend is the only truly sincere act we can do as humans because it is an act without pretense. We’re at our most truthful when we’re at our most whimsical, and at our most whimsical we wear our artifice on our sleeves. We play pretend. We cease to make sense of the world and simply interact with it. We play.
whimsy is both unserious and sincere. This is precisely its strength as a mode of being but also admittedly leaves it without an obvious core constituency (beyond, of course, children). whimsy is too unserious for the intellectual and too authentic for the humorist. It’s cringy to the ironist (sincere), it’s ambiguous to the sentimentalist (who need things to “matter”), and its embarrassing to observe—unless of course it’s transcendently beautiful.
whimsy is a kind of apathy without the nihilism. It’s the ability to do nothing, and do it joyously.
In her essay on the Iliad, Simone Weil describes force as that which turns a subject into a thing, an object. At its most extreme, “it turns man into a thing in the most literal sense: it makes a corpse out of him.”
Knowledge work often operates as a kind of force. Taking living, breathing, dynamic systems and codifying them down to an operable level: turning entire subjects into objects so we can talk about them in straightforward way. Objectifying reality is the purpose of science, after all.
Rao’s right when he says that taking something indeterminate and forcing it into something singular is a kind of killing. It’s a forceful act.
whimsy demands no such force. whimsy is anathema to force.
whimsy is the realm of imagination, which is an anti-force.
G.K. Chesterton, a purveyor of puns, fairy tale whimsy, and irony alike, says that “imagination makes us more like God.”
Emily Dickinson says that
God permits industrious angels
Afternoons to play.
whimsy and imagination are dynamically interrelated systems. Imagination is ipso facto an objectless process. It makes no definitional pretense of interacting with “reality.” To imagine is to “do” nothing. The verb “do” is an active verb here. To imagine, you have to actually “do” the nothing. Whimsy is an act, an action.
whimsy isn’t coextensive with imagination, but they both need one another. In a state of whimsy, meaning becomes as effervescent as one’s mood.
Keat’s related conception of “Negative capability,” i.e., a capacity of “being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason” is a type of whimsy. whimsy inhabits the unknown playfully, which is to say it is both open to the unknown and undemanding of its resolution.
In his poem, “Ode to a Nightingale” Keats’ speaker follows the song of a nightingale (an unselfconscious creature of nature. The song is so beautiful it causes him a “hemlock” like pain, both opiatic and uncomfortable from “being too happy in thine [the bird’s] happiness.” The speaker tries to follow this bird’s song. At first through wine, which fails. Then poetry which fails, too. Then finally, with death which also cannot hold. The bird “was not born for death” because it exists in nature—in a state of pure play which resists totalizing, which cannot be reached except through the playful negative capacity that ends the poem on a refusal of resolution:
Was it a vision, or a waking dream?
Fled is that music:—Do I wake or sleep?
One can live comfortably with uncertainty through both irony (letting things be multiplicative and layered) and whimsy (letting things just be). The poem ends in uncertainty, mystery, and doubt. It refuses to reach for reason. It plays.
In a state of irony things aren’t one or the other, they’re both! In a state of whimsy things aren’t. There is no ratiocinative center, any one thing at all. In whimsy every thing is the concert of all it’s in communion with.
Sincerity is an affect of attention. Irony is an affect of declaration. whimsy is complete attention at its highest fidelity: a playful looking that simultaneously erases and reifies the self.
Love is a type of a whimsy. Weil, for whom the love of God (a “Decreation” of the self, a total giving over of attention, a giving over of the ego in an act of open receptivity) is equivalent entirely to the love of neighbor, says:
The love of our neighbor in all its fullness simply means being able to say to him: “What are you going through?” It is a recognition that the sufferer exists, not only as a unit in a collection, or a specimen from the social category labeled “unfortunate,” but as a man, exactly like us, who was one day stamped with a special mark by affliction. For this reason it is enough, but it is indispensable, to know how to look at him in a certain way.
To love is to learn “how to look” or how to let one’s eye wander. Love is deeply serious, concerned with ones capacity to hold another’s suffering without flinching. Keats, too, asks us to search for suffering (melancholy) “in the very temple of Delight / [where] Veil’d Melancholy has her sovran shrine.” Melancholy exists within Delight. Suffering lives inside love. The capacity to hold this all is whimsy.
We learn to love, by playing.
Love is a whimsy, a whim wham, a plaything. It’s both. It has to be.
When one loves, one simultaneously proclaims (in utter sincerity) ‘I am looking at you with my entirety, immersed fully, in the act of seeing you,’ while fervently asking ‘do you see me too?’ To be in love is to inhabit both the decreating gaze, and the hypocrisy of your own neediness as a joy. Love doesn’t collapse this hypocrisy or synthesize or resolve it. It decreates the self so that the two can coexist without resolution.
It is whimsical to be in love.
It is both hypocritical and completely sincere. It’s both heavy and light as a helium balloon. It’s all of it, held at once.
That’s whimsy, right? whimsy holds the manifold creases and cracks between meanings together. (You are in love, do love, give love, keep love, share love, steal love, just love).
whimsy is what ee Cummings calls “the wonder that’s keeping the stars apart.” (the near end of the poem my wife and I read to each other the first time we were married.)
whimsical looking — the gaze also a plea to be seen — is love.
Sincerity, Imagination, and Love are a certain trinity of whimsy.
and now we’re in a tricky spot, you and I. See I want, really want, to finish this piece with a story about whimsy (maybe the one about sitting in a pool with her and her 60 year old aunt and uncle and holding our index fingers just above our heads as still as possible and then giggling when they dragonflies land, or no, maybe about my dog—aren’t they such whimsical creatures?—bounding through the snow and coming up from a sniff with his black nose besotted with white flakes, or, wait, nonono, how about the first time I knew I loved her: 4 days after we met, helping her move her mattress up a few rungs on the bunk bedframe and comparing famous singers’ voices to food and cosmetics—). But if I do, these stories stop being whimsical, right? They start to mean something. They’re being instrumentalized (and instruments are objects) to make you feel. To make me seem some way. To prove something. And what’s less whimsical than “proving” something???
There’s a deep irony here, too. Namely, this: I have changed these stories just enough to feel like I’m not staining or ruining them by sharing them here. In doing so, of course, I’ve actually sullied them more. I’ve stripped away details but kept what’s most important, vital, to each of them, reifying the thing that made me want to hide in the first place. Irony is something to play with, not hide from, in whimsy.
I think writing whimsy has to be something other than describing it. Maybe it’s about creating a space open and strange and meaningful and meaningless enough that play, imagination, and love are emergent properties of a reader’s engagement with the word. One can never perform whimsy, but maybe we can learn how to facilitate it?
I worry. Always. That by writing something down, I’m ruining it.
But I write anyways because writing is whimsical. Because, I’m sorry, all art is a whimwham, a useless but fun toy.
It’s all just a way to let our eyes wander.
That’s what makes it so important.
It’s funny. I don’t ever worry that loving her will ruin a single thing.
Gtg. The roof and her are calling.
Sincerely,
Spencer