A Meditation on Cool

Stumbling, Bumbling, but Mostly Coherent

I can’t remember the first time I heard the word “cool”, but I feel like I instantly knew what it meant. I think there’s something in the sound of the word itself — the way the sound waves bounce off the tongue on that last “l” sound. The way your lips have to be pursed like you’re blowing smoke rings, or kissing a seductive stranger. The way it all begins in your throat — almost guttural and filled with bass.

But I feel like coolness — for most of us — is much like the way Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart thought about pornography:

I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description, and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it.

We can spot cool. Miles Davis, a young Bob Dylan, Simone de Beauvoir. The list zig-zags through history. But what is it that makes them cool? Why is it that they just strike us as cool?

I think that though it seems to be something we see, it’s actually happening well below the surface — we just happen to catch a feeling by looking at those who have grabbed onto something.

What I think they have grabbed onto is an ineffable existential understanding of the human condition. They have tasted the absurdity of the web we weave, the futility of worry, the ineffectiveness of expectations and desire, and are shrugging it all off before our eyes — and it bewilders and amazes us.

A lot of people think that true cool comes from just not caring. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Being cool requires the kind of not caring that comes from countless deep and dark moments of really caring — solitary and searching moments. Moments where emotional intensity builds to a crescendo of intimacy with the secrets of the universe, and collapses into exhaustion and repose. But we never see those moments. We just see the results — and we are enchanted.

I think that cool is the result of taking a long hard stare at the abyss, the abyss which — as Nietszche warned — stares back. It’s the result of staring at that abyss as it stares back, and refusing to flinch. It is desiring what everyone desires so badly and so much more intensely, that you no longer desire it. It is life after life after death — a post afterlife. It is to be so utterly authentic that it becomes clear that there is no self to be true to. It is the kind of obfuscation that can only come from being completely and totally clear. It is all of these things wrapped up into one.

I guess what I’m really trying to say is that I don’t see cool as much as I used to. It may be that I’m not seeking it out like I used to, but I just get the feeling that cool has eluded us at this time in history. I’m sure that we will once again encounter it, and it will feel just as it used to. Until then, however, I keep an eye out for it. Not too eagerly, of course, but just kind of leisurely, and, well — cool.

What about you? Yeah, you there. What say you?