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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Superfuzz helpfully notes that this marvelous bit of futurism seems to be derived from Jacques Tati’s Playtime, a clip of which is here.
Superfuzz helpfully notes that this marvelous bit of futurism seems to be derived from Jacques Tati’s Playtime, a clip of which is here.
“I do not read advertisements. I would spend all of my time wanting things.”
Franz Kafka, quoted by Animosa. It’s important to be careful what you allow into your mind; I can read a damn appliances catalog and notice incipient stirrings of possessive desire.
“Little Banana,” from Bottle Rocket. I always thought Anderson really captured the behavioral essence of the Southern preppie in this scene.
“I have lived through much, and now I think I have found what is needed for happiness. A quiet secluded life in the country, with the possibility of being useful to people to whom it is easy to do good, and who are not accustomed to have it done to them; then work which one hopes may be of some use; then rest, nature, books, music, love for one’s neighbor — such is my idea of happiness.”

Leo Tolstoy, quoted by Everybody Cares.

Update from the comments: “As everyone who has read his biography knows, it didn’t work. It didn’t even come close.” Human life in two sentences!

GPOYW: The-I’m-Sorry-I-Don’t-Smile-in-the-Morning-I-Am-Aware-It-Makes-Me-Look-Like-A-Moody-Adolescent-(Which-Maybe-I-Rather-Am-But-I’m-Trying-Not-To-Be)-And-Also-I-Remembered-(Again)-That-I-Was-Out-Of-A-Necessary-Prescription-At-Midnight-And-Had-To-Wait-At-A-Pharmacy-Reflecting-On-How-The-Profession-Of-Pharmacist-Was-Once-Different-And-the-Avuncular-Old-Man-Helping-Me-Likely-Wanted-To-Be-The-1950s-Sort-of-Pharmacist-Not-the-24-Hour-Staffing-CVS-Anonymous-Drone-Sort-All-Of-Which-Means: I-Was-Up-Too-Late-Edition. I feel fine now, though: caffeine and dogs, you know?

GPOYW: The-I’m-Sorry-I-Don’t-Smile-in-the-Morning-I-Am-Aware-It-Makes-Me-Look-Like-A-Moody-Adolescent-(Which-Maybe-I-Rather-Am-But-I’m-Trying-Not-To-Be)-And-Also-I-Remembered-(Again)-That-I-Was-Out-Of-A-Necessary-Prescription-At-Midnight-And-Had-To-Wait-At-A-Pharmacy-Reflecting-On-How-The-Profession-Of-Pharmacist-Was-Once-Different-And-the-Avuncular-Old-Man-Helping-Me-Likely-Wanted-To-Be-The-1950s-Sort-of-Pharmacist-Not-the-24-Hour-Staffing-CVS-Anonymous-Drone-Sort-All-Of-Which-Means: I-Was-Up-Too-Late-Edition.

I feel fine now, though: caffeine and dogs, you know?

I’ve posted this photo before, but I wanted to use it nevertheless to frame the following excellent passage, from Roger Scruton’s “A Carnivore’s Credo,” included in The Best American Essays, 2007: “[Animals’] mute lack of self-consciousness neutralizes our own possession of it and makes it possible to pour out on them the pent-up store of fellow-feeling, without fear of reproach. At the same time, we are acutely aware of their moral incompetence. Their affection, if it can be won at all, is easily won, and based on nothing. However much a man may be loved by his dog, this love brings warmth and security but no release from guilt. It implies no moral approval and leaves the character of its object unassessed and unendorsed.” I don’t know many who are more affectionate with and dependent on their pets than I; I love my dogs dearly, and have loved animals of all sorts for my entire life, even working at a veterinary hospital for a spell to see if the work suited me. But I can still admit that this passage is absolutely true and why those people who genuinely seem capable of substituting the love of their pets for the love of their fellow man to me seem more interested in escaping “assessment” of their moral character than in love. Scruton’s essay, which argues that vegetarianism is gaining in popularity partly due to our need to experience moral piety as part of our diet (and the decline in such piety as we’ve moved from humane husbandry and family dinners to factory farms and fast-food, from cultivation to consumption), is absolutely brilliant. Note: I’ve posted several other amazing photos from Taschen’s A Thousand Hounds, which is like a history of photography as told through photos only of dogs.

I’ve posted this photo before, but I wanted to use it nevertheless to frame the following excellent passage, from Roger Scruton’s “A Carnivore’s Credo,” included in The Best American Essays, 2007:

“[Animals’] mute lack of self-consciousness neutralizes our own possession of it and makes it possible to pour out on them the pent-up store of fellow-feeling, without fear of reproach. At the same time, we are acutely aware of their moral incompetence. Their affection, if it can be won at all, is easily won, and based on nothing. However much a man may be loved by his dog, this love brings warmth and security but no release from guilt. It implies no moral approval and leaves the character of its object unassessed and unendorsed.”

I don’t know many who are more affectionate with and dependent on their pets than I; I love my dogs dearly, and have loved animals of all sorts for my entire life, even working at a veterinary hospital for a spell to see if the work suited me. But I can still admit that this passage is absolutely true and why those people who genuinely seem capable of substituting the love of their pets for the love of their fellow man to me seem more interested in escaping “assessment” of their moral character than in love.

Scruton’s essay, which argues that vegetarianism is gaining in popularity partly due to our need to experience moral piety as part of our diet (and the decline in such piety as we’ve moved from humane husbandry and family dinners to factory farms and fast-food, from cultivation to consumption), is absolutely brilliant.

Note: I’ve posted several other amazing photos from Taschen’s A Thousand Hounds, which is like a history of photography as told through photos only of dogs.

Fable

Magic Molly posted the following very good piece:

Picture this: two friends, Alice and Molly, are lying next to each other on a bed, staring up. Suddenly, Alice gets a mental picture of their prone selves and giggles. “Hmm?” says Molly.

The image that has occurred to Alice is of the Pioneer Plaque— the little sign affixed to NASA spacecrafts in case they encounter extraterrestrial life. It is one of those government quirks that sounds fictional but isn’t.

The plaque was designed by Carl Sagan, and it has all sorts of information on it. There are numbers in binary, a schema of the solar system, and outlines of a man and a woman:



This last thing is what Alice has thought of, suddenly, lying next to Molly with their hands almost touching. The figures on the plaque had originally been drawn holding hands. The image was revised when it was objected that aliens might misinterpret the figures as one creature.

Alice liked that story. Everything about it.

“To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god.”

Jorge Luis Borges, quoted by Alphabet Pony, via Greg Brown. This is even more profound, in my view, than this earlier quote, and between the two of them I think one is given a fairly good sense of why religions of all forms (including credulous movements not explicitly supernatural in their claims) exist.

  1. All sorrows can be borne if part of a story, a narrative that transcends any given catastrophe (and doesn’t this idea echo the much-reblogged Nietzsche quote about a “strong enough why” enabling the survival of any “how”?).
  2. Love is problematized by the fallibility of the human world (and doesn’t this remind one of Gauntlet’s excellent de Botton quote concerning the end of our romanticism about what’s possible in marriage?).

Nothing in our world can be infallible, so if one is to escape Borges’ quandary one must have a god -or an object of love and trust- specifically not of this world; whether this god is created or creator is not relevant to this discussion. Anything not of this world is by its nature unimpeachable by truth claims of this world (although of course texts and mythical assertions and histories are impeachable). It is also unsupportable by truth claims of this world, incidentally.

Any story which can absorb all sorrows must be a story which includes the whole of the world and encloses it within something larger, something integrative. It must be able to narratize -to assemble into a broadly meaningful myth- the loss of a dog, the death of a child, the genocide of a people.

Religions are those systems which attempt, however successfully or unsuccessfully, to accomplish these tasks: to unfold stories into which your private tragedies and joys, and those of larger human groups, may be written as part of a narrative with sufficient scope to make them bearable, and to provide an infallible purposive deity in whom you can believe, whatever the phenomena of the natural and human worlds.

In our era, many other credulous movements have attempted to do the same with a lesser reliance on the supernatural, but equivalent use of myth and the aura of infallibility. What makes religion more durable is its explicit exemption from natural inquiry; whereas few Christians mind that there is no trace of the miraculous in our world, it is problematic for Marxists that some of the iron-laws of history predicted by their founder have not come to fruition (yet!).

I know I said I’d not mention this again, but I was struck by the synchronicity of these quotes.

The Judgment of the Past by the Present

It is perhaps obvious how indebted I am to Milan Kundera for my political and artistic sensibilities; as often as I mention Errol Morris (thanks, Riazm!), it is Kundera who has primacy among my influences and for whom I have the most affection.

On a day when, as Doree noted, he has been implicated as a one-time informer (in 1950, when he was 21), I was heartened to see quoted by Bunnynico a passage from my favorite of his works, Immortality. She relates the following quote to our American election:

Of course, imagologues existed long before they created the powerful institutions we know today. Even Hitler had his personal imagologue, who used to stand in front of him and patiently demonstrate the gestures to be made during speeches to fascinate the crowds. But if that imagologue, in an interview with the press, had amused the Germans by describing Hitler as incapable of moving his hands, he would not have survived his indiscretion by more than a few hours. Nowadays, however, the imagologue not only does not try to hide his activity, but often even speaks for his politician clients, explains to the public what he taught them to do or not to do, how he told them to behave, what formula they are likely to use, and what tie they are likely to wear. We needn’t be surprised by this self-confidence: in the last few decades, imagology has gained a historic victory over ideology.(….)

Public opinion polls are the critical instrument of imagology’s power, because they enable imagology to live in absolute harmony with the people. The imagologue bombards people with questions: how is the French economy prospering? is there racism in France? is racism good or bad? who is the greatest writer of all time? is Hungary in Europe or Polynesia? which world politician is the sexiest? And since for contemporary man reality is a continent visited less and less often and, besides, justifiably disliked, the findings of polls have become the truth. Public opinion polls are a parliament in permanent session, whose function is to create truth, the most democratic truth that has ever existed. Because it will never be at variance with the parliament of truth, the power of imagologues will always live in truth, and although I know that everything human is mortal, I cannot imagine anything that could break this power.

Bunnynico has more very interesting analysis on these ideas here, and links to an article called Milan Kundera and Image. I consider his commentary on politics and media to be of tremendous value and quite accurate in their assessment; as I’ve expressed, I believe it is image (or we might say “the personal” or “the demographic-aesthetic”) that is responsible for almost all “political” beliefs.

But I want to mention something else: if you’ve read Kundera, you are familiar with his utter hostility to (1) the reduction of artists to their biographies, which he considers not merely a useless form of analysis for art but in fact one that misleads and distorts and (2) the judgment of the past by the present.

This latter phenomenon is perpetual and embarrassing: we are so happy to condemn those whose historical context was to them the fluid and impossible terrain of the present, but is to us the exposed and dissected landscape of the textbook. As Kundera once wrote, man proceeds through life as though walking down a path in the fog. He can see perhaps a few steps ahead of himself, and a bit to the woods on either side, but not more. When we look back on him, we see only the path and never the fog. It is all so clear!

Perhaps these themes interested him because he knew that in his early, revolutionary youth –at a time when most of our intellectual heroes were enthusiastically embracing murderous cretins like Stalin, Mao, and Che– he stumbled on his path. Or perhaps his interest was merely that of the artist: generalized, human, investigative.

Kundera never speaks to the press, but he’s spoken about this to emphatically deny it. My affection for his work biases me, so I offer no conclusion. I think, however, that we ought to remember the fog of the time, the youth of the man, and the impossibly inertial forces of history, which have now reached across fifty-eight years to grasp at an artist who’s spent his life fleeing them.

CNN.com, running a useless and superficial story on “Lessons from the Great Depression” alongside a headline reading “Dow soars,” quotes a commenter from Louisiana: “‘It was a uniquely disgusting thing,’ Donna LeBlanc of Waxia, Louisiana, said of watching her grandfather eat squirrel.’ Notes: So many people down here still eat squirrel that I cannot imagine where Donna LeBlanc has been hiding to have found it objectionable (or associated with times of economic distress). Waxia, LA, is a town so small that Google Maps doesn’t show it in a search, although Mapquest does. CNN’s “iReport” farce continues to amuse. Besides, everyone knows that the economy is fine until people are eating armadillo.

CNN.com, running a useless and superficial story on “Lessons from the Great Depression” alongside a headline reading “Dow soars,” quotes a commenter from Louisiana: “‘It was a uniquely disgusting thing,’ Donna LeBlanc of Waxia, Louisiana, said of watching her grandfather eat squirrel.’

Notes:

  • So many people down here still eat squirrel that I cannot imagine where Donna LeBlanc has been hiding to have found it objectionable (or associated with times of economic distress).
  • Waxia, LA, is a town so small that Google Maps doesn’t show it in a search, although Mapquest does.

CNN’s “iReport” farce continues to amuse. Besides, everyone knows that the economy is fine until people are eating armadillo.

“All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell a story about them.”
Isak Dinesen, quoted by Kyle Bingman. This is the purpose of nearly all culture, I think, and much of the occasional depression has to do with the unraveling of one’s story: when suddenly sorrows stand as isolated losses, catastrophes without transcendent contexts, instead of components of a meaningful narrative of overcoming.
From the fascinating Stumblng Tumblr comes this, “one of a series of charts comparing the size of world rivers and of world mountains; it’s from 1822.” He found it “here; if the idea appeals to you, you really should go to the link, where you can get both a large size of the chart above and many other examples of similar charts.” I liked this one, of Scotland’s mountains.
From the fascinating Stumblng Tumblr comes this, “one of a series of charts comparing the size of world rivers and of world mountains; it’s from 1822.” He found it “here; if the idea appeals to you, you really should go to the link, where you can get both a large size of the chart above and many other examples of similar charts.” I liked this one, of Scotland’s mountains.
“If facts be nature’s words, our words should be true sign of nature’s facts. A word rightly imposed is a landmark indicating so much recovered from the region of ignorance”
Sir William Gull, physician.
A Biographical Sketch of Sir William Gull, published 1896. It’s amusing to think of how many very distinguished lives have been lived, or indeed of how many lives at all: perhaps more than 100,000,000,000, and us: just a few of those, not radically dissimilar from the rest and sure to follow the same rough arc.
A Biographical Sketch of Sir William Gull, published 1896. It’s amusing to think of how many very distinguished lives have been lived, or indeed of how many lives at all: perhaps more than 100,000,000,000, and us: just a few of those, not radically dissimilar from the rest and sure to follow the same rough arc.
“Shall man be given marvels only when he is beyond all wonder?”

Sir William Gull, fictionalized by Alan Moore in From Hell. The novelized Victorian sociopath discusses our modern world:

It would seem we are to suffer an apocalypse of cockatoos… Morose, barbaric children playing joylessly with their unfathomable toys. Where comes this dullness in your eyes? How has your century numbed you so? … Your days were born in blood and fires, whereof in you I see not the meanest spark! Your past is pain and iron! Know yourselves! With all your shimmering numbers and lights, think not to be inured to history. Its black root succors you. It is inside you. Are you asleep to it, that cannot feel its breath upon your necks nor see what soaks its cuffs?

To paraphrase Kundera: history is not the opposite of forgetting; history is a form of forgetting, a process of deliberative and accidental omission. It is hard to remind ourselves of how this world was made, and how persistent the cruelty and barbarism of its creators are. Our capacity for rationalization begins with memory: the editorial selection of what we recall is followed by the replacement of low fact with high theory.

And what a truth: we attain mastery of the planet, of the sky, of space, and are so quickly accustomed to this mastery that we’ve lost the capacity for awe. It is difficult to recover, although certain arts help a great deal.

Thanks for the recommendation, Frank.