mills

Topherchris. I agree, and without any condescension implied for that effort, which I consider to be one of the finer aspects of the human mind. The fact that some patently fabricated systems of belief retain resonance for us demonstrates how naturally we seek meaning, despite much despair-inducing evidence that it is not to be found.

Topherchris’ comment reminded me, too, of the various modes of belief available to us, and the various types of knowledge we use to sustain them. Just as many of us both believe and discount superstition (quietly avoiding cracks in the sidewalk as we parade our rationalism), so do many of us have competing types of knowledge.

I find the tension between two types most interesting; these names might not be optimal, but they serve this purpose:

1. Cognitive knowledge is the sort we acquire in school or from media or peers, which we examine it and incorporate into our minds through cognition, and are critical of and selective about. It is transmissible, replicable, and external.
2. Experiential knowledge is what we gather through sense perceptions and mental impressions as we live; it is harder to be critical and selective with it as its immediacy seems to overrule interrogation, and it is transmissible only by transforming it -usually with language- into knowledge for others to treat as type (1), meaning they may reject it or accept it or recontextualize it.

It is immediately evident that the second type is irrational and impressionistic, but what is notable is how totally it overpowers the first type in our deliberations. Perhaps as it is likely the older of the forms of knowledge, it has nearly total supremacy in the mind, whatever our evolved protestations to the contrary.

Examples abound: residents of Louisiana casually cite “global warming,” a phenomenon in which they didn’t believe prior to Katrina, as the cause of any erratic weather at all, as what Ph.D.s and Al Gore couldn’t do some hurricanes and some snow have (although no experts claim a correlation). Some victims of crime perpetrated by a given race abandon all understanding of statistics or proportion and become racists. Fiercely logical people who deride religion hear bumps in the night and assert that ghosts exist.

And so on. It is not a question solely of intelligence but also of priority: that which we experience seems incontrovertible, while in a world increasingly defined by unintelligibility, by the outsourcing of comprehension to “experts” and the simultaneous unmasking of experts and debunking of expertise, cognitive knowledge does not.

Propaganda and media tactics which succeed in creating experiential impressions are more effective, for example, than cogent and sober essays. Even though experiential knowledge is largely incoherent, unexamined, emotionally-colored dreck, we trust it more.

(Note: you might think of art as the taking of type (2), the elaboration of it into type (1) in the mind of the artist, and the creation of something which can then provoke type (2) in the audience’s mind for the achievement of some type (1) end [though some would dispute the last element strenuously, arguing for non-didactic art]. You also might not).

Clive James, describing the “lust for discovery [that is] a feeling as concentrated and powerful as amorous longing, with the advantage that we never [have] to fear rejection.” James’ point is elsewhere, and I don’t wish to linger on the notion of art as an escape except to note that if it is, it is not necessarily a cowardly one.

Milan Kundera once defended Igor Stravinsky against critics who, romantics and sentimentalists that they were, felt he suffered from a “poverty of heart.” He didn’t emote enough for them, and as music seemed to serve these critics as a mirror in which to observe (and parade) their own feelings he was thus a formalist and a failure.

Kundera mounts a convincing counter-argument before additionally noting that Stravinsky’s critics themselves didn’t “have heart enough to understand the wounded feelings that lay behind his vagabondage through the history of music,” to see that devotion to art and to form and to beauty is a sort of love in itself, one perhaps preferable for a man so displaced in reality as Stravinsky. (Stravinsky lived in exile, and -Kundera claims- found his home in music’s historical development).

If your country is taken over by savage ideologues and your woman runs off with your friend, taking the dog, you can do worse than turning yourself over to art, which is never insincere in its desire to share something -life, experience, perception, form- with you.

Georg Cristoph Lichtenberg, quoted by Clive James in an essay on the craft of writing that was at once illuminating and embarrassing for me; much of it describes, with as much wit is in this sentence, the sorts of failings I detect in my prose (and, it follows, my thought).

There is often a correlation, I think, between how automatic prose is and how weak it is. For language to escape the anesthetizing effects of cliche, which weakens meaning by making words into tuned-out ambient noise, it must be novel -or at least not shopworn- in formulation. This requires effort, as does anything that deviates from normative patterns. But we should not escape from cliche by contorting language into unwieldy or inefficient forms, a mistake I make daily. James separates the various types of chaff:

“With the majority of bad writers the question [of meaning] never comes up. As Orwell points out in his indispensable essay “Politics and the English Language,” they write in prepared phrases, not in words, and the most they do with a prepared phrase is vary it to show that they know what it is. Usually, they are not even as conscious as that, and their stuff just writes itself, assembling itself out of standard components like a spreading culture of bacteria, except that most of its components are too faulty to be viable. Our real concern here, however, is not with writing too bad to matter… What troubles us is the writing imbued with enough ambition to outstrip its ability.”

I think that’s a fair description of much of what I’ve written in my life, and it doesn’t hurt to say so: there is something to be said for ambition (which I otherwise lack entirely), and it is after all only in trying that we learn to do. As James notes later, writers “must accept that one of the secrets of creativity is unrelenting self-criticism.” Without that, I suspect one has no hope of writing anything worthwhile except by accident; for this reason, it’s commendable to cringe while editing and flush when rereading one’s writing; indeed, I’m glad I dislike most of it, or it would be quite a lot worse. That said, self-criticism must not be so masochistic that we silence ourselves, unless we’ve determined that we’ve nothing to add, a rare and admirable conclusion I should probably reach more often.

James Ryerson, in an essay on David Foster Wallace’s college philosophy thesis (posted by the always-astute Greg Brown). This is a brilliant point.

I like Wallace very much, but I think any honest critical appraisal of his work must admit that this tension was not necessarily one deliberately enacted (and therefore performative, artistic, or creative), but indeed one he couldn’t escape; perhaps none of us can escape it in this era. The question then becomes: was it a strength or a weakness?

I don’t think that in admitting our favorite artists have weaknesses we do them a disservice; indeed, pretending otherwise is to perpetuate a hagiographical fiction that precludes real understanding of their work. That they struggled with foundational weaknesses is what made their art purposive; it is the source of much of it, I think.

At times, I felt that Wallace was very desperately attempting to overcome through co-option the problem of how “abstract thinking” and “theoretical paradigms” negate or subsume “basic truths,” but unsuccessfully. After some of his stories, it seemed clear that this problem cannot be overcome through co-option; discussing the intrusion of ideology, intellectualism, and theory into our art by introducing them into our art to “enact” the problem is like trying to calm ourselves by discussing how nervous we are: sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.

I don’t know how this feature of our age can be overcome (if I did, I would be orders of magnitude smarter, and a writer); various tactics include the deliberate removal of theory from art leaving viciously irreducible corpses of prose, as in McCarthy, or the winnowing of the novel to only the most elegant shapes and sighs, as in Barnes or Kundera. I’m sure other tactics abound: lyricism, impressionism, minimalism.

But I think Wallace was right to recognize that most of these were retreats from the problem, and he was noble for choosing engagement instead; that such engagement sometimes weakened his fiction does not diminish the value of his efforts.