GPOYW: I am very much my parents’ child, happily. (Mom and dad, 1975, photographed by my father’s brother).
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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“Humanity will surpass the first dirigibles as it has surpassed the first locomotives. It will surpass M. Santos-Dumont as it has surpassed Stephenson. After telephotography it will continually invent graphies and scopes and phones, all of which will be tele and one will be able to go around the earth in less than no time. But it will always be only the temporal earth. And it will even be possible to burrow inside the earth and pierce it through as I do this ball of clay. But it will always be the carnal earth.”
Charles Péguy, quoted by Clive James.
Almost one year ago, I posted a note about sunburn, which in its annual recurrence demonstrates how resistant I am to learning even the simplest lessons (let alone complexly painful ones having to do with love and selfhood).
This weekend, I spent some time at the beach with Elle Belle. In St. Augustine, FL, a strange city with a stranger transient population of tourists and bikers and hippies and rednecks, I received a pleasant reminder from the universe that I still don’t know anything and that even writing about sunburn will not save me from my stupidity (the same parenthesis applies again: the reflection and analysis of my tendencies in life and love has had little effect on my habits).
My stupidity notwithstanding, it was an excellent time. Above, we are in her friend A’s backyard. Below, additional selected photos from the full set here:
My spartan room at a commune / hostel in Linconville; the absence of sheets made me feel at home.
Henry Flagler, tycoon and developer and city patron.
A week ago, I was wearing my heaviest jacket.
I spent an hour with an old couple who travel the East coast flying their hundreds of kites; the largest here is 100 square feet with two 100 foot tails.
Moss at night.
Little known-facts: Elle is a unicorn, naming a playground space shuttle “Challenger” is considered inspirational, and people make flowers out of other plants and give them to you if you stand around on the beach with a camera long enough.
“With the possible exception of Buddhism, no religion we know about is capable of allying itself to the state without working to the destruction of liberty. Less commonly noted is that it will also work to the destruction of itself, by trivializing its own teachings, or rendering them obnoxious in the attempt to impose them legally, instead of by exhortation, example, and witness.”
Clive James. I tend to think that only a religion which stands apart from society can meaningfully refer to the proposed eternal world which is its proper concern; excessive preoccupation with the minutiae of contemporaneity degrades any faith.
Like most of Cultural Amnesia, the essay offers aphorism after aphorism, the elegance of its insights demanding multiple quotations. I apologize for the length of the following, but given James’ status as an agnostic (if not atheist) cultural critic and historian par excellence, I feel his view is fascinating. Speaking of how translations of the Bible erode credulity, James notes that:
“The King James Bible is a prose masterpiece… The modern versions, done in the name of comprehension, add up to an assault on readability. Eliot said that the Revised Standard Version was the work of men who did not realize that they were atheists. The New English Bible was worse than that… For those of us unable to accept that the Bible is God’s living word, but who believe that the living word is God, the successful reduction of once-vital language to a compendium of banalities was bound to look like blasphemy… For me, the scriptures had provided a standard of authenticity against the pervasive falsehoods of advertising, social engineering, moral uplift, demagogic politics -all the verbal corruptions of democracy, the language of illusion… I don’t want the teachings of Jesus taken from me… If I no longer know that my redeemer liveth, I know that he speaketh not like Tony Blair. It is true that Jesus never spoke the language of the King James Version… But the language of the King James Version is of a poetic intensity congruent with the impact Jesus must once have had on simple souls, of whom I am still one: simple enough, anyway, to need my sins forgiven. Now that there is nobody to do that for me, I must try to do it myself. Like most men with a conscience, I find that very hard, and spend much time feeling absurd. But without the scriptures we poor wretches would be lost indeed, because without them, conscience itself would become just another disturbance of the personality, to be cured by counseling.”
While I think substantial exceptions can be taken to some of his points, James routinely delights me by his serious and apolitical engagement with the sources of culture; he is never facile because his subject -the world of meaning- never is either.
“One writes of scars healed, a loose parallel to the pathology of the skin, but there is no such thing in the life of an individual. There are open wounds, shrunk sometimes to the size of a pin-prick but wounds still. The marks of suffering are more comparable to the loss of a finger, or of the sight of an eye. We may not miss them, either, for one minute in a year, but if we should there is nothing to be done about it.”
Tender Is The Night, F. Scott Fitzgerald, quoted by Riaz.
Cricket came to Baton Rouge to see the musician Ryan Adams and stayed with me and Will. It was quite a lot of fun: she is as she seems on her site, funny and insightful and reflective and unique, and we greatly enjoyed having her (even if our tour of the city was somewhat lacking).
This was the second time I’ve met an Internet person, the first being my similarly awesome time with Fat Manatee. More photos here!
“A congrecyon of people, a hoost of men, a felyshyppynge of women, a bevy of ladies, we must speak of a herde of hartys, swannys, cranys, wrennys, a sege of herons, or bytourys, a muster of peacockys, a watche of nyghteyngalys, a flyghte of doves, a claterynge of choughes, a pryde of lyons, a slewthe of beerys, a gagle of geys, a skulke of foxes, a sculle of frerys, a pontyfycalate of prelates, a bomynable syght of monkes, a dronkenshyp of cobblers, and so of other human and brute of assemblages”
This quote carries a dual dedication: to Sara McPherson for this, and Raynor Ganan of the Ragbag for everything. Their independent preoccupations with animal nomenclature and taxonomy called to mind a book I read in high school, more than a decade ago: Cosmic Consciousness, by Richard Maurice Burke.
The sort of idiosyncratic work I am fortunate to have been given by my dad, Cosmic Consciousness was published in 1901 and billed as “A Study in the Evolution of the Human Mind.” It was provocative and grand and fascinating, and it influenced me greatly. But there was something specific I remembered about it:
The word felyshyppynge. In reflections on the nature of language, Burke discusses some deprecated collective nouns from English’s past, some of which were so amusing that despite having forgotten thousands of crucially important things since the late 90s, I’ve never forgotten that word.
In addition to those quoted above (emphasis on my favorites), he mentions the words used for preparing food:
“In like manner in dividing game for the table the animals were not carved, but a dere was broken, a gose reryd, a chekyn frusshed, a cony unlacyd, a crane dyspalyed, a curlewe unjointyd, a quayle wynggyd, a swanne lyfte, a lambe sholderyd, a heron dysmembryd, a pecocke dysfygured, a salmon chynyd, a hadoke sydyd, a sole loynyd, and a breme splayed.”
I would love for Raynor or Sara to arrange these in some delightful graphic for the betterment of us all; I would, but I have a felyshyppnge banging my door down and a hadoke which must be sydyd before we begin our meal. Excuse me.
(Photo by mzhao; see also Jairus Tonel’s post of Jeffrey Milstein’s airplane photos).
The bird inhabits the sky, its flight as natural as the suspension of a cloud: as graceful, as freely achieved. It has no anxiety: it needn’t monitor hydraulic lines or fuselage stress. It is made for the sky above all places.
The plane’s flight is an overcoming, a stressed and obsessive insistence: engines scream until they shatter your ears and smash the plane forward through the sky. Explosive forces are marshaled to fight the plane’s inertial essence: materials of the machine age cling to the dirt.
Tonight I saw birds overhead and realized that I do not fight my nature as I once did. The designers of planes dreamed of flight and forced their way through it, but I now want to take or leave flight: where I might fly by nature I will, but I want no longer to scream and fight my way across any sky.
Is this laziness, acceptance, the discarding of delusion, or something else? Is it fear?
“Listen: I am ideally happy. My happiness is a kind of challenge. As I wander along the streets and the squares and the paths by the canal, absently sensing the lips of dampness through my worn soles, I carry proudly my ineffable happiness. The centuries will roll by, and schoolboys will yawn over the history of our upheavals; everything will pass, but my happiness, dear, my happiness will remain, in the moist reflection of a streetlamp, in the cautious bend of stone steps that descend into the canal’s black waters, in the smiles of a dancing couple, in everything with which God so generously surrounds human loneliness.”
Vladimir Nabokov, “A Letter That Never Reached Russia.” The wonderful KB adds:
“If you replace the setting of Berlin with my home and the canal with the river, you will know of the only way I have found to deal with the feeling that life has deep meaning but the knowledge that - when considered in relation to the universe - it has very little or even none.”
This problem so well-phrased by K -our feeling that life has deep meaning but the general scientific and philosophic consensus that “in relation to the universe…it has very little or even none” (beyond what we fashion for ourselves, which is contingent and negotiable and both as profound and as superficial as a fairy tale)- this is the great problem of our time, maybe of all times.
With what meaning can a human be satisfied, sustained against fear and suffering? How much do we need our meaning substantiated outside ourselves? Is self-constructed meaning enough? Socially-constructed meaning? Or should we turn away from meaning and towards happiness, the simultaneously modest and grand happiness of the present, of observation, of Nabokov’s awareness of “the smiles of a dancing couple”?
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).
“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.
