GPOYW. I and the windows behind me are reflected in Bayou’s eye while I take her picture; one can see her legs and body roughly as she does, splayed out before her (cropped from this).
mills
My name is Mills Baker; I write about love, culture, art, religion, mental illness, philosophy, memory, politics and the rather random.
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“Every living creature on Earth dies alone.”
Since I can remember, I have loved sodium-vapor light: the orange low-intensity glow from municipal lamps that for me recalls the warmth of a sunset but in a sea of night’s blackness: a concentrated sunset, a sunset threatened by oblivion.
The other night, taking photos of sodium lights, I recalled a possible explanation: my father used to tell me stories when I was very young about a telephone pole / streetlamp that faced our house in Mississippi. I remember little except that, incredibly, he would make them up as he went, narrating adventures in which I would confront some danger and would require the assistance of this telephone pole, which could magically move and bash foes into the ground. In one, I think he saved me from a demon wearing a cloak.
If I recall correctly, this pole looked a bit as though it had a face, at least to a child, and while I am not sure whether it was sodium vapor I do suspect that my fondness for such lights is at least connected to these memories.
I also find it extraordinary and moving to imagine my father twenty years ago, tellings such stories -of a boy and his sidekick / protector, the magic telephone pole from Bay St. Louis- to his son on summer nights, a small act of creation, a tiny narrative gift of remarkable ingenuity and invention.
The Pleasures of Vigilantism
“In any dispute the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the stakes at issue.”-Sayre’s Law
Outraged moral vigilantism is the preferred role of the truly self-regarding; it affords its enactor a degree of rhetorical drama usually present only in thundering Hollywood courtroom scenes and permits a degree of smug self-satisfaction to accompany acts of violence. It is only the indignant vigilante who may at once try to hurt others and claim to be the victim of their stupidity, who may simultaneously attack and claim to defend, who may enact the ultimate passive-aggression: to persecute those s/he hates while declaring that it is they who offend.
Intellectuals are deeply attracted to such vigilantism, perhaps because –as Sayre famously noted- the fighting is most bitter when the stakes are low. Moreover, intellectuals are accustomed to being derided; at the first chance to deride another, we are ecstatic; we tend to be quite mean, given the chance. This ecstasy would be accompanied by guilt were it not for the intellectual’s innate capacity for rationalization: I am not being mean! Those I mock and attack and pick apart are, by their very lifestyles and characters, egregiously offensive to the just moral order! They are attention whores and materialists and racists and narcissists! They deserve to be hurt!
It is perhaps worth noting that everyone who hurts anyone thinks it is justified. But we might also ask: why do moral vigilantes hurt others? The general explanation –that someone needs to do it, that the world needs intellectual or aesthetic or moral policemen- fails to persuade. This is evident for the simple reason that people who mock others, who are morally outraged by what they perceive in others, do not want those people to change or go away. They use ineffectual methods deliberately.
If they wanted them to change, they would attempt –as we all do when trying to correct someone we love or persuade someone we respect- to compassionately, patiently, and with tremendous care argue their perspective, with only one stylistic imperative: to not alienate them, to not hurt them, to keep them engaged and willing to change. This does not guarantee success, of course, but it is the only feasible way to argue if we actually hope to persuade: start from what is shared, make sure you are respectful, and communicate that you are not attacking, only hoping to help.
If they wanted them to vanish, they would ignore them. Then they have vanished! It is like magic! If they want to show the world what is wrong with their targets, they would be what they think someone ought to be and illustrate by contrast: always more effective than illustration through attack.
But moral vigilantes enjoy hurting people, despite the fact that no one learns from derision or mockery or even brilliantly witty cruelty. Indeed, the opposite happens: curse me, laugh at me, attack and humiliate me, and I retreat into myself, cement my identity, fortify my defenses, become ever more committed to those elements of my identity under siege. Indeed, we might say: the surest way to preserve and perpetuate what you dislike in someone is to attack them for it. The surest way to eradicate what you dislike in someone, of course, is to stop disliking things in others; but that is much harder than tossing off a profane screed or savaging someone’s prose.
The final issue remains: what is it about us that inclines us to want to hurt others instead of trying to change them or showing the world what we think a person ought to be? I believe –based purely on what makes me angry, what makes me want to be mean- that it is always pain, always insecurity, always some inner torment. I have noted with alarm that almost everyone who angers me does so, as Hermann Hesse predicted, by reminding me of something I dislike in myself. The moral vigilante who hates others for their narcissism believes his or her feelings about narcissists are so important that they should be publicized to the anguish of the narcissists: if this isn’t narcissism, what is?
And so I propose this axiom, which can be contested but which guides me now, particularly in my writing: in almost all cases, to tell someone something is wrong with them is only to announce what is wrong with us. It is worse than mean, worse than ineffectual: it is literally counter-productive, and represents only our desire to attack while wearing the romantic mantle of the defender; like any desire, it tells the world more about us than about its object.
Note: this has little bearing on criticism as academically understood, of works or arguments, only on criticism of people; moreover, I am aware that I have been exceedingly guilty of this in my life and can only apologize to those whom my arrogance, criticism, and meanness have wounded.
Update: Jeff Miller very rightly notes that I’ve erred in ascribing malice to moral vigilantes (indeed, I likely did so because they remind me of myself: I needed some critical distance as self-assurance!). His comment is excellent; he points out that moral outrage is “imparted to us in childhood such that it becomes almost instinctual and unthinking…driven by habit, and not enjoyment… Are not some arguably misled to think that their actions are persuasive; that ridicules produces change and conformity? And if they believe that this change is necessary to save a soul (through religion, or even aesthetics or philosophy), aren’t they perhaps bound in allegiance to something higher than enjoyment? … Moreover, the biggest moral vigilantes I’ve met are rather unhappy people; they may be getting something from their crusade, but I wonder if it’s enjoyment…” Agreed.
Concrete and wires constrain an oak before an abandoned house.
“Each aesthetic judgment is a personal wager; but a wager that does not close off into its own subjectivity; that faces up to other judgments, seeks to be acknowledged, aspires to objectivity.”
Milan Kundera, The Curtain. Almost all discussions about the aesthetic values must address this problem: are judgments about art subjective or not? It is common enough in our time to consider everything subjective, but this is not so: indeed, it is the supposition of objective aesthetic values that permits art to have historical continuity in the first place, despite being the work of many thousands or millions of individuals:
…in the absence of [presupposed objective] aesthetic value, the history of art is just an enormous storehouse of works whose chronologic sequence carries no meaning.
This is clearly not the case, as anyone who knows the full catalog of a band or the arc of a painter’s career will attest; it is even truer when one looks at movements and counter-movements. The history of the arts is comparable to a conversation with consequential threads, and like a conversation this history presupposes certain values; what the content of those values is, whether they are to be celebrated or violated, traced or transgressed, is another matter.
But what is striking about Kundera’s passage, to me, is that he refrains from acting as a philosopher: he does not argue that aesthetic judgments are subjective or objective, but rather than they are in a zone between those categories: each one is a personal wager which aspires to objectivity.
Although most debates about art and aesthetics quickly become debates about the implicit morality, politics, or personality-associations of the debaters, those that don’t still may come to dead ends: someone will say, “Well, it is only your opinion,” or someone else will say, “It’s all just taste.”
And it at once is and isn’t. We may all have our happenstance proclivities, but these are irrelevant except to us. What makes an aesthetic judgment defensible is the degree to which its aspirational objectivity is supported by context, by historical observation, by comparison and contrasting, by references to the internal coherence, logic, structure, and intention of the art in question (I apologize to anyone who strictly supports the notion that there is an ‘intentional fallacy’).
Such qualities buttress an aesthetic judgment, but while it may asymptotically approach objectivity it will never achieve it, not even in the cases of the greatest artists: when Nabakov hates Dostoevsky and Musil finds Kafka dull, you know that understood objectivity is a myth (and those were all roughly contemporary European men!).
Witold Gombrowicz said that any artist is an anti-scientist, and Kundera’s unscientific assertion that aesthetic judgments are personal but not merely subjective, individual gambles communing with the objective, is an excellent example of why I prefer this mode of thought.
On a windy night, one sees that the ground is grounded; the higher one goes the greater the wind’s effects. I don’t care what anyone says: it must be hard to be a leaf.
After a Memorial Service
Someone loved by a close friend died recently, and today I went to the memorial reception. Some things were exemplary of Louisiana: the boiled crawfish, shrimp, muffalettas, boudin balls, catfish, and jambalaya on offer. Shouting children from all branches of the family filled the spaces in conversation left by trailing recollections of the departed: one memory, another, a tentative laugh over some bit of recalled ribaldry, then sighs. And then the children running in the distance, a beautiful day for play affording us all the luxury of hearing them. These were the sounds of the gathering. These are the sounds of past and future.
The program from the service included letters to the deceased’s from his wife and two young sons; all three mentioned that he was in Heaven, that his death was the will of God, and one son mentioned that someday he’d join his dad there. All sorrows can be born if they are part of a story, it is said. Who are we to try and destroy one another’s stories? Why are all stories in competition?
As I looked at a photograph of the dead man and his family, his mother –very old, perhaps senile –came up behind me and said, “That’s my boy who died,” just like that. Moments later, his son charged through the room and out onto the front lawn, face reddened and contorted as he was again overcome by grief. When he returned, he brusquely and with obvious effort at self-control asked if someone would please turn off the television playing the slide show of his father, which had been repeating for hours. Someone did. The son then changed and went for a run. The last time I saw him, he seemed to be smirking. At what? At the peripheral mourners, I thought: what the hell do they know about it? But maybe I just felt guilty that I couldn’t share more of his grief.
On the drive back to the office, everything I saw neutrally announced its impermanence, but that neutrality was offensive to me: I am upset at loss. The cigarette butts along the side of the highway, mixed with pebbles and trash and the detritus of commuters: they formed small spatial scenes out of which could be composed an entire world but which would wash away with the next rain. Closed shops seemed like unkempt tombs for the aspirations of ordinary people, and who knows what failed with them: security, marriage, life itself? Felled trees across the ground retained the frozen gestures of their branches: they had grown old, grown hard, towered in the forest only to fall, as everything must.
“The other night I was lying in bed, in that half-waking, half-dreaming state familiar to all. I imagined my death, and realized that I would not see you and Alex and Ellen again. The feeling was powerful and very sad. Now I have this thought. Without death would we understand love, real love? Could we love? The connection may not be apparent, but it may be implicit in that saying from the Book of Common Prayer: “In the midst of life we are in death.”
An email from my dad, who very seldom writes this sort of thing to me; that he is sixty-six years old concretizes this observation in a manner I find terrifying.
I love Mardi Gras unreservedly. Despite having quit drinking more than eight years ago, I find it as thrilling and affecting as I ever did, and even tend to enjoy something of a contact-high from the intoxication of the city. This year, I decided to use the occasion not solely as an excuse to experience euphoria but also to work on photographically capturing both night scenes and the spaciousness and energy of crowds.
Some of the results are amateurish, but I was happy as hell to have another way to interact with my city and to see the lights and kinetics of the parades more precisely than I had before (and thanks to Benjamin Hilts and Nudawn and Nora Leah -who’s been there- for the kind words!).
Many photos are in this Mardi Gras photoset, and a few are below. I hope some of them impart a sense of the affair, but that might be asking a lot. Selections:
An LED-covered clown-bearing float in Endymion passes our spot on Canal.
Flambeaux.
Will enjoys a moment between bouts of catching more than any adult male I’ve ever seen; he is at Gallier Hall, where thanks to Eric, a legislative director, we sat in the booth next to Ray Nagin’s for the Sunday day parades.
A little girl claps along with a marching band at night.
Throngs disappear into the lights of passing Bacchus floats on St. Charles. I tried many like this.
I remember wanting so much more than I caught, too.
A Zulu rider and a Saint.
A makeshift “Let Them Eat Shit” banner accompanies chants of “Laissez-les manger la merde,” before this krewe collided with a “Jesus train” beneath St. Louis Cathedral: quintessence of Mardi Gras.
More are here, including shots of Will unknowingly attracting cougars, Eric as the next mayor, the Quarter, and -of course- Five, who didn’t come to any parades.
In 1981, my mother completed a camera strap for herself. An excellent amateur photographer, she took albums and albums of pictures as I and my sister grew up, so that Rolleiflex cameras and the strap above have for me the incredible resonance that the iconography of childhood retains: the illustrations from a bedtime book, a favorite stuffed animal, etc.
When I arrived in New Orleans on Saturday she gave it to me. I found it a more moving exchange than I probably should have: I was touched, excited, a bit honored even, although she’ll laugh at that.
I love having this strap, nearly as old as I am, holding the Nikon; she used to sing “Kodachrome” to me, too, I think unaware of its drug reference, and I have that terribly rare and happy sense that something good in my family now expresses itself through me.
This is the best way I was ever given a phone number. It will soon enough be a year since we decoded and untangled this, you. It has been fun, hasn’t it?
There is a fraught relationship between the people one cares for and how one writes, and between subjects and muses. At times, you may recognize that someone is overwhelmingly important to you if you cannot write well about them, only to them. On the other hand, this may merely reflect one’s creative limitations: one cannot gain literary ascendency over everything.
But one shouldn’t want to: better to have such friends than to be able to write about them. Life over art, one might say.
“[Jerry Lewis] needs the applause too much. You can hear that need in every convulsive laugh and see it in a smile that stretches across his face like an abyss. Comedy is an art of desperation, feeding on the laughter and love of the audience, and few screen comics have worn that hunger more openly than Mr. Lewis has. To watch one of his early romps, including those with his longtime partner, Dean Martin, is to witness not just the pathos of that need, but also its horror. When Jerry Lewis laughs, his rubber-band lips widen across his cheeks, creating an enormous hole, a cavern of dark. It’s as if he were simultaneously splitting himself open for our delectation and trying to swallow us whole, maybe both.”
Although a bit vicious, Manohla Dargis’ piece on Jerry Lewis and his consolation Academy Award offers some fascinating observations about comedy; although there is no manifestation of this in my writing, I am told by real-life acquaintances that I’m “funny.” What I always wish to note for them is that the degree to which I am probably reflects a lamentable attention-seeking or need for affection, the “desperation” Dargis describes above. I’ve also heard comedy described by many, including Steve Martin, as a violent struggle for control: “I killed them,” “I died up there,” etc.
But no intersection of pathos and comedy is comparable to Lewis’ eternally unseen holocaust-clown magnum opus The Day the Clown Died. If you have never read about this film -which culminates in Lewis as a clown leading doomed Jewish children in a gas chamber- you should; it (unintentionally) expresses so much: themes of egomaniacal grandiosity, artistic hubris, comic desperation, deep cultural resentment, barbaric self-centeredness, insensitivity born out of personal pain, etc.
I hope to see it someday; it very much sounds like the worst movie that could possibly be made.
Soon I’ll be home in New Orleans for Mardi Gras (all the way through Tuesday, happily). I remain as fond of it as I was when a child, and even as I was when I drank, although I’ve begun to tire more easily from the endless walking, yelling, supporting of others on shoulders, cooler-carrying, and late nights at dingy Uptown bars. Gripes of age aside, I find it more exciting every year; I think I get better at enjoying the colors, sounds, and shapes in themselves without expecting of the sorts of adventure that I pursued when I was sixteen.
Above, Mardi Gras in 1908; see also these shots from Momus in 1961.
