Greetings and Salutations

Could it be that, although I heard no rushing mighty wind, nor saw anything cloven and fiery, tongues of some sort have descended upon me, enabling me to speak the languages of grump and grouch, in their various dialects of peeve, churl, spleen, crab, and curmudgeon.   What makes me think I’ve been thus linguistically gifted?  The churning irritation I experience with the checkout clerk at the local grocery store, that’s what.

For more than eight months now, Philip has plied the register when I make my customary lunch hour “small shopping” run to the store to restock necessaries prior to the next “big shopping.”  And for more than eight months, as I deposit my basket on the counter, Philip has said the same thing: “How you doing today, sir.”  Always.  The same thing.  Exactly.  For more than eight months, Philip has taken my checks and listened to me discourse on the merits of braeburn apples and sprouted-grain bread and Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups.  For more than eight months he has heard the produce manager and butcher and assistant manager and manager and other customers address me by name, ask after the family, inquire how my classes are going or the progress I’m making on my latest home-improvement project or whether I’ll take up golf again.  Eight months, and still he remains quarantined behind a practiced smile and the frayed cuff of a phrase: “How you doing today, sir.”  And not just me.  He uses the same greeting for everyone, varying only the last word if the customer is female: “How you doing today, ma’am.”

Perhaps my irritation is shamefully self-absorbed, or trivial, or even wasted, there being so many other things far more irritation-worthy.  Still, it’s real enough, palpable enough, and it’s got me thinking about the way we greet each other in our culture, why is has to be so impoverished, so flat-souled; why anything beyond the brisk and passing “How’s it going” or “How are you” and the bright, upbeat response “Fine” is a breach of decorum so outrageous it’s beyond the reach of the confessional; why, as with Philip’s, our greetings and salutations are so manufactured and   homogenized and rinsed clean of all particularity; why they are Lysoled to sterility, dehydrated of personal significance; why they are such Disneyesque simulacra of inquiry and concern, such gestures of exchange rather than the full-blooded reality of exchange; why we tune ourselves to the frequency of social interaction while engaging in woefully abridged and illusory version of it.  And that’s if we even get a chance to offer a greeting: so often, we encounter others so intent on  some smartphoned attraction or so involved in some cellphoned conversation that a greeting seems a punishably intrusive  breach of privacy.

Now, I am aware that our greeting style is a species of what linguists call “phatic communication,” nonreferential salutation rituals not intended to solicit or convey information but, rather, to meet social expectations.  They are culturally coded interactions, designed to  politely acknowledge another’s presence, nothing more.  They are inessential essentials, impertinently pertinent, unassailably decent and decorous and courteous and civil, to be sure, but so astringently impersonal, so devoid of warmth or at least the flavor of the person who utters/mutters them.  We encounter each other and, like threatened hedgehogs, we roll ourselves into  protective balls.  We meet and greet and quickly retreat. We occupy a shared space without being much occupied about it.  We pledge ourselves to sociality while disavowing our participation in it.  And to go beyond the formulaic response, to breach the ritual requirements, to actually explain how one is doing or how things are going, seemingly makes one a fit subject for police surveillance. 

And yet, I can’t help but wonder how it is that we accept such cultural conscription so compliantly, why we give it such snappy salutes.  Perhaps the problem is that I am so bad at it.  Perhaps I want too much.  I am insatiably curious about others.  I really do want to know how things are going for them, how they see and feel about things.  If we’re going to open a hailing frequency, it ought to be for a moment that feels whole, not an eighth or a sixteenth.  If we pay the price of a greeting, we should get some value in return, not a distanced and distancing “Fine” or “OK”  or a flutey “hello” that hangs in the air a beat or two after the speaker has hastened on. Where is it we hasten to?  What summons us away with such importunity?  Why are we in such desperate haste, Thoreau asked.   More than two millennia ago the Greek philosopher Heraclitus observed, “We share a world when we are awake; each sleeper is in a world of his own.”  Our greetings a sleeptalking, and what they say, what lies coiled implicitly within them, is, “You’re marginal, a matter of peripheral vision, worth no more than a sidelong glance, only to be engaged as ritual requires, an inhabitant of a parallel world that is momentarily contiguous to mine and which I am obliged to acknowledge but only in the most formulaic manner.” 

Every meeting with another, every encounter, is a moment of connection.  Why not make it several moments, just several, and hem them together into an economy of exchange with more solidity than interstellar dust?  It would seem a shame to waste them, especially if the many chroniclers of our waning social connectedness, are correct.  If, as they assert, we yearn for social contact, need it, why is it we become bystanders in the very act of initiating it?  Why not make those encounters more consequential, less frictionless contact; why not make them denser with recognition, less an impassive passing? 

My colleague Brian greets every student that appears at his office door with a hearty, surprised-and-delighted “hi,” that rings down the hall.  My colleague Barbara sweeps students into her office, offers them a chair, slides her computer aside and asks about important past or upcoming events they may have previously mentioned.  Another colleague, coming up behind me as we toiled up two flights of stairs to reach our classrooms, said, “You know, I’m convinced that every summer, in the dead of night, some malign elf enters the building and adds one step to each flight.  It’s the only way I can account for why each year I grow more fatigued climbing these stairs”—a slyly revelatory comment which got us talking about age.

I use a strategy suggested by the poet Jon Cotner’s Spontaneous Society, which is dedicated to making “gentle interventions” that puncture “urban anonymity”: initiating a social exchange by making observations about what others are doing or what is happening around them.  Last week, as I walked through the science and math building, I came upon one of my students looking frazzled before an open organic chemistry book.  “O-Chem has to be the hardest subject of all,” I said.  The student looked up and smiled wryly: “It’s so complicated; I can’t keep it all straight,” she said.  “I know exactly what you mean,” I replied; “I barely passed it when I took it in.  What’s the hardest part for you?” 

It is hard, exceedingly hard, maybe impossible, to make the phatic emphatic, to make greetings occasions, to be fully present in them, to fashion them into instants of authentic inquiry and regard.  The mundane has its own insistent demands.  They muddle our mindfulness, meander it, loosen its tensile grip.  It is hard.  But it is important.

Small talk in small moments in small encounters, fleeting, to be sure; but also, I’d like to think, small transfigurations, the melody of greeting in sync with its music, a momentary bond hijacked from the cubbyholes of fragmentation and isolation.