mills

My name is Mills Baker; I write about love, culture, art, religion, mental illness, philosophy, memory, politics and the rather random.

My Photo Blog
Flickr / Videos
Facebook / Twitter
Email / Archive


Sophie Scholl, of the White Rose resistance group; killed February 22, 1943. Clive James, despite his atheism, wrote that Sophie Scholl “was probably a saint” and compared her to Jesus Christ; her face on German postage stamps is as great a symbol of transformation as Saul’s conversion, a demonstration that neither a state nor a human is ever beyond redemption. There is some question, however, as to whether every member of our species remains human; in their spellbound, somnambulistic stupor, the Germans of the 1930s and 1940s can be said at the very least to have permitted as inhuman a machine as was imaginable  to assemble itself from their institutions and indeed their very body politic: the infernal Nazi state which defies credulity and has thus become myth. We feel that the Germans, the Wermacht, the Nazis, the Gestapo, must have been monsters, not ordinary typical humans as we are. Whatever they were, there were few dissenters in their midst; and even if one objected to Nazism, one knew one could do nothing; and had one a family, what would running out into the street to be shot down by the SS as they came to capture one’s neighbor do anyway but assure that one’s child, too, would die in a camp, or at least be orphaned? Against sufficient power, morality is purely sacrificial; even if we can accept this for ourselves, can we accept it on behalf of others who need us? Perhaps this is why the White Rose was comprised of the young, though not exclusively. A small, hopeless band of Germans who resisted the Nazi regime, they engaged in the simple, chiefly symbolic act of circulating essays which attempted to wake readers from the sociopathic trance in which they seemed to have been lulled by Hitler. That students, powerless and doubtless aware that they faced assured death were they caught, turned to the essay as a means of protest is significant; they were using the expression of the West’s cultural heritage, its literary and rational tradition, as means to combat the negation of that heritage: irrational authoritarianism: It is impossible to engage in intellectual discourse with National Socialism because it is not an intellectually defensible program. It is false to speak of a National Socialist philosophy… At its very inception this movement depended on the deception and betrayal of one’s fellow man; even at that time it was inwardly corrupt and could support itself only by constant lies. After all, Hitler states in an early edition of “his” book (a book written in the worst German I have ever read, in spite of the fact that it has been elevated to the position of the Bible in this nation of poets and thinkers): “It is unbelievable, to what extent one must betray a people in order to rule it.” In their leaflets, which quoted Goethe and Aristotle, they argued both for intellectual resistance and for sabotage, and called attention to the slaughter of the Jews, the Poles, and others, asserting every argument against the Nazi machine they could muster: on theological, practical, political, patriotic, historical, artistic, and moral grounds they fought the lies of propaganda and the delirium of the trance-state. As they surely knew would happen, they were caught; in 1943, all were arrested by the Gestapo, tried, and executed. There is a great deal more about their story here; it is as moving as anything I know. As one playwright noted: The fact that [these] little kids, in the mouth of the wolf, where it really counted, had the tremendous courage to do what they did, is spectacular to me. I know that the world is better for them having been there, but I do not know why. The emphasized last line seems crucial to me; I can only suggest that in their sacrificial courage, their refusal to abrogate their innate moral duty -which tens of millions of their peers had happily neglected-, and their sagacity despite their youth, the White Rose confirm that there was the finest sort of humanity even in the midst of that infernal machine. Maybe it is that they remind us that heroism is possible for all. (Note: I’d written and abandoned dozens of posts about them several months ago while briefly fixated by ideas about morality, resigning myself to the customary sense of oafishness one feels when speaking of the very precious, but was reminded of them again by the eminent B. Michael’s note about Holland, 1954, a Neutral Milk Hotel song which mentions them. It isn’t surprising that Jeff Mangum alludes to them; one can easily grow as obsessed with the White Rose as with Anne Frank, and I find it hard not to search photos of Sophie Scholl for signs of her core, the source of her heroism, the looming loss).

Sophie Scholl, of the White Rose resistance group; killed February 22, 1943.

Clive James, despite his atheism, wrote that Sophie Scholl “was probably a saint” and compared her to Jesus Christ; her face on German postage stamps is as great a symbol of transformation as Saul’s conversion, a demonstration that neither a state nor a human is ever beyond redemption.

There is some question, however, as to whether every member of our species remains human; in their spellbound, somnambulistic stupor, the Germans of the 1930s and 1940s can be said at the very least to have permitted as inhuman a machine as was imaginable  to assemble itself from their institutions and indeed their very body politic: the infernal Nazi state which defies credulity and has thus become myth. We feel that the Germans, the Wermacht, the Nazis, the Gestapo, must have been monsters, not ordinary typical humans as we are.

Whatever they were, there were few dissenters in their midst; and even if one objected to Nazism, one knew one could do nothing; and had one a family, what would running out into the street to be shot down by the SS as they came to capture one’s neighbor do anyway but assure that one’s child, too, would die in a camp, or at least be orphaned? Against sufficient power, morality is purely sacrificial; even if we can accept this for ourselves, can we accept it on behalf of others who need us?

Perhaps this is why the White Rose was comprised of the young, though not exclusively. A small, hopeless band of Germans who resisted the Nazi regime, they engaged in the simple, chiefly symbolic act of circulating essays which attempted to wake readers from the sociopathic trance in which they seemed to have been lulled by Hitler.

That students, powerless and doubtless aware that they faced assured death were they caught, turned to the essay as a means of protest is significant; they were using the expression of the West’s cultural heritage, its literary and rational tradition, as means to combat the negation of that heritage: irrational authoritarianism:

It is impossible to engage in intellectual discourse with National Socialism because it is not an intellectually defensible program. It is false to speak of a National Socialist philosophy… At its very inception this movement depended on the deception and betrayal of one’s fellow man; even at that time it was inwardly corrupt and could support itself only by constant lies. After all, Hitler states in an early edition of “his” book (a book written in the worst German I have ever read, in spite of the fact that it has been elevated to the position of the Bible in this nation of poets and thinkers): “It is unbelievable, to what extent one must betray a people in order to rule it.”

In their leaflets, which quoted Goethe and Aristotle, they argued both for intellectual resistance and for sabotage, and called attention to the slaughter of the Jews, the Poles, and others, asserting every argument against the Nazi machine they could muster: on theological, practical, political, patriotic, historical, artistic, and moral grounds they fought the lies of propaganda and the delirium of the trance-state.

As they surely knew would happen, they were caught; in 1943, all were arrested by the Gestapo, tried, and executed. There is a great deal more about their story here; it is as moving as anything I know. As one playwright noted:

The fact that [these] little kids, in the mouth of the wolf, where it really counted, had the tremendous courage to do what they did, is spectacular to me. I know that the world is better for them having been there, but I do not know why.

The emphasized last line seems crucial to me; I can only suggest that in their sacrificial courage, their refusal to abrogate their innate moral duty -which tens of millions of their peers had happily neglected-, and their sagacity despite their youth, the White Rose confirm that there was the finest sort of humanity even in the midst of that infernal machine. Maybe it is that they remind us that heroism is possible for all.

(Note: I’d written and abandoned dozens of posts about them several months ago while briefly fixated by ideas about morality, resigning myself to the customary sense of oafishness one feels when speaking of the very precious, but was reminded of them again by the eminent B. Michael’s note about Holland, 1954, a Neutral Milk Hotel song which mentions them. It isn’t surprising that Jeff Mangum alludes to them; one can easily grow as obsessed with the White Rose as with Anne Frank, and I find it hard not to search photos of Sophie Scholl for signs of her core, the source of her heroism, the looming loss).

“Everywhere I go I find that a poet has been there before me.”

Sigmund Freud, quoted by Wolf and Fox. Psychotherapy in its infancy seemed like an effort to scientifically objectify artistic knowledge about humanity and its fears, longings, dreams; much reads like literature, and some -like Jung- sounds religious. It is emblematic of the 20th century that we attempted this translation of poetics into science.

Art reminds us endlessly that human life is essentially unchanging, that we are not different from our forebears, whose concerns and fears and dreams we share, that history is more cyclical than linear. Science tells us the opposite: that history is linear and progressive, that the world and human society are perfectible, and that we are ever-advancing: it is a kind of post-religious eschatology.

Some time ago, writing about Chaplin and Einstein, I wasn’t precisely sure why we now so strongly prefer science to art, but I partially suspect it is because science offers a much more alluring myth than art does, and consoles us in our mortality by telling us that with every decade our species advances towards an unspecified state of angelic or utopian transcendence.

As with the perpetually preparatory model of life offered to a modern citizen, in which every phase of education, employment, courtship, and leisure is measured by its capacity to position one for the next phase, the implied anthropology of a scientific / technocratic model is one of promise: diseases cured, inconveniences conquered, understanding attained, life extended. The purpose of humankind is to perfect itself and the universe, it is suggested, and this will occur; we are thus part of a narrative journey into an ideal future (and as Frankl and James have noted, deprived of a sense of futurity we tend to collapse).

I mean to take nothing from science in noting that although it is among the finest achievements of humanity, certain facts remain which art is better-suited to convey: that despite the Large Hadron Collider and jet airplanes and vaccines and psychotherapy, we remain deeply strange, hopeful, fearful, loving, jealous, giving, deranged, ingenious creatures as mortal as we’ve ever been, and that whatever humanity’s future evolution every one of us lives and dies alone.

It is well that science incrementally improves us, our world, and our understanding of the universe, but it is not surprising that Freud felt as though he was following poets: art, free from rationalism, epistemological restraint, or the need to solve the problems it finds beyond cathartically bringing them into our awareness, often arrives first, and sometimes goes deepest.

Train tracks: seem almost to be a miniature. (Photophobia / Via /Larger)
Train tracks: seem almost to be a miniature. (Photophobia / Via /Larger)
“Words were so much more alive and more difficult to handle, now; so much so that Kit did not seem to understand them when he used them. They slipped into his head like the wind blowing into a room, and extinguished the frail flame of an idea forming there in the dark. Less and less he used them in his thinking. The process became more mobile; he followed the course of thoughts because he was tied on behind. […] It was an existence of exile from the world.”
Paul Bowles in The Sheltering Sky, quoted at fuller length by E.C. Mendenhall, who continued with fascinating commentary on the idea that to live abroad is to speak “with imprecision [and] to attach a margin of error to every idea one wishes to express.”
Things Fall Apart / Things Pile Up: Junkyard House (Photophobia / Via / Larger). Among the various low-grade forms of insanity that constitute normative behavior  -those tics and quirks that are common enough to statistically override their seeming aberration- we can distinguish whole worlds of unclassified dysfunction. One area of lunacy that resonates: the panic one feels over the accrual of things, the anxiety one experiences when one realizes how much stuff one has, how it hems one in, how it can never be organized, cleaned, sorted, arranged, used, perfected, or discarded. Maybe there ought to be a name for the dementia of object-anxiety; maybe there is. In the absence of a name, a disorder is just a description, and no matter how bizarre it is it disappears into the private sphere of individual idiosyncrasy: one retreats into one’s junkyard house and nervously wonders what to do with all these wrecked machines.

Things Fall Apart / Things Pile Up: Junkyard House (Photophobia / Via / Larger).

Among the various low-grade forms of insanity that constitute normative behavior  -those tics and quirks that are common enough to statistically override their seeming aberration- we can distinguish whole worlds of unclassified dysfunction. One area of lunacy that resonates: the panic one feels over the accrual of things, the anxiety one experiences when one realizes how much stuff one has, how it hems one in, how it can never be organized, cleaned, sorted, arranged, used, perfected, or discarded.

Maybe there ought to be a name for the dementia of object-anxiety; maybe there is. In the absence of a name, a disorder is just a description, and no matter how bizarre it is it disappears into the private sphere of individual idiosyncrasy: one retreats into one’s junkyard house and nervously wonders what to do with all these wrecked machines.

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

Keith Jarrett - Excerpt from Vienna Concert, Part I.

Taking an excerpt from the Vienna concert is like showing a two-minute clip of one’s most cherished movie, or reading three pages from one’s favorite book, or perhaps like having a long-distance relationship.

But Part I, which is available in its entirety here, is 41 minutes long; in its astonishing perfection, too, it can require more attention than is reasonable to request. I hope, perhaps absurdly, that this excerpt appeals; I think Jarrett is one of the finest musicians of our time.

(And here are some previous videos and comments about him).

I’ve written about Jared S. Stratodrive many times, and once reminisced about the time -long ago- when we knew one another rather well. True to form, he modified the hardware of the Olympus D-395 to take the images above and below. They seem like miniatures, or stills from US Army footage of nuclear blast tests: model towns constructed by GIs in the New Mexican desert to evaluate the effects of ever-more-powerful atomic explosions on ordinary, fragile human communities. The tree’s leaves seem like an oncoming avalanche of smoke, dust, and debris overtaking the thin wood walls of the homes: in their suggestion of frozen disaster, these images underscore how violently photography can arrest the kinetic. (Here). And yet everything seems so delicate when shrouded in this light. I am reminded again of the quality Heineman’s photos have: the aesthetic of something captured, gently removed from the streaming temporality of life, measured and recorded and tagged, then let go again. I imagine, thinking about it now, that photography and scale-models appeal to me because they are comparable: the deliberation excision of a specific moment or set of dimensions and its careful reproduction. (Here). J.S.S. has even offered to help you learn how to do this, should you be so inclined; and if you’re not, you shouldn’t waste his time unless you want to wind up in his massive skull collection, the likes of which I’ve seen in exactly one place besides his apartment.

I’ve written about Jared S. Stratodrive many times, and once reminisced about the time -long ago- when we knew one another rather well. True to form, he modified the hardware of the Olympus D-395 to take the images above and below.

They seem like miniatures, or stills from US Army footage of nuclear blast tests: model towns constructed by GIs in the New Mexican desert to evaluate the effects of ever-more-powerful atomic explosions on ordinary, fragile human communities.

The tree’s leaves seem like an oncoming avalanche of smoke, dust, and debris overtaking the thin wood walls of the homes: in their suggestion of frozen disaster, these images underscore how violently photography can arrest the kinetic.

(Here).

And yet everything seems so delicate when shrouded in this light. I am reminded again of the quality Heineman’s photos have: the aesthetic of something captured, gently removed from the streaming temporality of life, measured and recorded and tagged, then let go again. I imagine, thinking about it now, that photography and scale-models appeal to me because they are comparable: the deliberation excision of a specific moment or set of dimensions and its careful reproduction.

(Here).

J.S.S. has even offered to help you learn how to do this, should you be so inclined; and if you’re not, you shouldn’t waste his time unless you want to wind up in his massive skull collection, the likes of which I’ve seen in exactly one place besides his apartment.

“His strongest tastes were negative. He abhorred plastics, Picasso, sunbathing, and jazz - everything in fact that had happened in his own lifetime. The tiny kindling of charity which came to him through his religion sufficed only to temper his disgust and change it to boredom. There was a phrase in the ‘thirties: “It is later than you think,” which was designed to cause uneasiness. It was never later than Mr. Pinfold thought. At intervals during the day and night he would look at his watch and learn always with disappointment how little of his life was past, how much there was still ahead of him. He wished no one ill, but he looked at the world sub specie aeternitatis and he found it flat as a map; except when, rather often, personal annoyance intruded.”
Evenlyn Waugh, The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold (via the excellent Sarah Belfort).
Last night’s dead leaves & dirty ground. (Photophobia / Flickr / Larger).
Last night’s dead leaves & dirty ground. (Photophobia / Flickr / Larger).
“Shakespeare is bent on finding men and women who, without losing the virtues and integrity of their own sex, have also the virtues of the other. If Shakespeare had no admiration for the womanly woman in the sense of the clinging vine, neither had he for any of the manly men as embodied in what our generation refers to as the “he-man” or the “red-blooded man.” He scorned the gentleman, but all his best men are gentle men.”
Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare, quoted by one of the smarter people I know.
Through the wonderful Mumblelard I saw this photo of Brerfly and her brothers. She wrote: super heroes are always fighting My brothers were always playing together and I was left out most of the time.  I don’t know why I was standing there, just waiting to get hit, but I do know that I was wearing one of my favorite outfits: snow pants without a shirt during the summer in East Tennessee…  Plus that is my bikini bottom on my head. Brerfly’s childhood photos are transfixing: dynamos arrested in supersaturated color and her smiling, beach scenes that remind me of trips I’d forgotten utterly (and particularly: eating fried chicken in the sand, nursing jellyfish stings, talking to hermit crabs), and so on. As I was exploiting her memories as a means of accessing my own -and I suppose that’s one v. nice element of memoir, and something to be said in defense of sharing one’s recollections the next time a cultural critic paid by the word constructs an uptown thesis about how ‘society has developed a technologically unilateral communicative dysfunction’ or whatever- I came across her trip to see the work of Howard Finster with her family: I saw Finster’s work most recently at the High in Atlanta, and in fact posted the image below when I returned to Louisiana; it was one of several I liked so much: When I saw these pieces, I thought: I really don’t ever want to see anything else until I’ve seen all the ‘folk art’ in the world; folk art seems like art that is still concerned chiefly with meaning, beauty, and expression, rather than the formal and, in my view, absurd & dull considerations that occupy professional artists (like contrived originality, referential commentary, and so on). You don’t need an essay on the wall next to a Finster piece; it speaks for itself. It was nice to be reminded of such color, in life and in art, on a gray Sunday morning.

Through the wonderful Mumblelard I saw this photo of Brerfly and her brothers. She wrote:

super heroes are always fighting

My brothers were always playing together and I was left out most of the time.  I don’t know why I was standing there, just waiting to get hit, but I do know that I was wearing one of my favorite outfits: snow pants without a shirt during the summer in East Tennessee…  Plus that is my bikini bottom on my head.

Brerfly’s childhood photos are transfixing: dynamos arrested in supersaturated color and her smiling, beach scenes that remind me of trips I’d forgotten utterly (and particularly: eating fried chicken in the sand, nursing jellyfish stings, talking to hermit crabs), and so on.

As I was exploiting her memories as a means of accessing my own -and I suppose that’s one v. nice element of memoir, and something to be said in defense of sharing one’s recollections the next time a cultural critic paid by the word constructs an uptown thesis about how ‘society has developed a technologically unilateral communicative dysfunction’ or whatever- I came across her trip to see the work of Howard Finster with her family:

I saw Finster’s work most recently at the High in Atlanta, and in fact posted the image below when I returned to Louisiana; it was one of several I liked so much:

When I saw these pieces, I thought: I really don’t ever want to see anything else until I’ve seen all the ‘folk art’ in the world; folk art seems like art that is still concerned chiefly with meaning, beauty, and expression, rather than the formal and, in my view, absurd & dull considerations that occupy professional artists (like contrived originality, referential commentary, and so on). You don’t need an essay on the wall next to a Finster piece; it speaks for itself.

It was nice to be reminded of such color, in life and in art, on a gray Sunday morning.

This stormfront was minutes away, and gentler white clouds and light blue sky still draped over us languidly; unaware of the violence headed towards them, they were like decorations at a party soon to turn foul. I took a few photographs of rain in the distance, gloom fast-approaching, then returned to my desk. I then sat for some time watching as the darkness gathered, as though my eyes were closing slowly and in steps, and waited for the rain. When it came, it came with cracks of lightening and shortly-following thunder that shook the windows and made one feel as though one weren’t a manager in revenue-generating, global enterprise of some hundreds of thousands of employees working for their customers, themselves, their leaders, their subordinates, and their shareholders, hemmed in by complexly inconsistent policies designed to regulate the unreliable behavior humans exhibit and minimize the so-called ‘exposure’ of the company to ‘liability,’ but rather that one was a primitive, crouching human on a plain being swallowed by the sky. The interruptions of our routines brought about by disaster accounts for our abiding attraction to it, I think, as does the manner in which profoundly severe weather, with its indifference to all we’ve wrought as a species, reminds us of scales of existence and cycles of time beyond the minimal ones we anxiously inhabit. I am grateful for that. It felt so nice to watch the sky wash over us all. (From Photophobia; larger size).

This stormfront was minutes away, and gentler white clouds and light blue sky still draped over us languidly; unaware of the violence headed towards them, they were like decorations at a party soon to turn foul. I took a few photographs of rain in the distance, gloom fast-approaching, then returned to my desk.

I then sat for some time watching as the darkness gathered, as though my eyes were closing slowly and in steps, and waited for the rain. When it came, it came with cracks of lightening and shortly-following thunder that shook the windows and made one feel as though one weren’t a manager in revenue-generating, global enterprise of some hundreds of thousands of employees working for their customers, themselves, their leaders, their subordinates, and their shareholders, hemmed in by complexly inconsistent policies designed to regulate the unreliable behavior humans exhibit and minimize the so-called ‘exposure’ of the company to ‘liability,’ but rather that one was a primitive, crouching human on a plain being swallowed by the sky.

The interruptions of our routines brought about by disaster accounts for our abiding attraction to it, I think, as does the manner in which profoundly severe weather, with its indifference to all we’ve wrought as a species, reminds us of scales of existence and cycles of time beyond the minimal ones we anxiously inhabit.

I am grateful for that. It felt so nice to watch the sky wash over us all.

(From Photophobia; larger size).

Pomegranate

At night this thought occurs: lost love offers a glimpse of mortality. The anguish is not in the darkness or void itself but in recalling that past superabundance of light and warmth. And just as when one leaves love, when one leaves life the change is not in the air, not in the Earth: one is cold as clay, but the sun shines freshly across grasses as though one were newborn.

That is to say: you are dead, not life; the fault is yours. Will you recall when you are dirt what it was like to breathe? Isn’t this how it feels to recall the freely loving moments of one’s life before one fell darkly and dumbly into oneself?

One’s flesh was different, as though one’s arteries poured wine or one’s heart was a pomegranate; now one merely wonders: does the heart pump the toxins which poison the mind, or does the mind plot the suffocation of the heart? What accounts for this internecine murder? Did one damage oneself through cowardly decisions or is this what one always was, but love was some sort of transformation, one that we cannot enact alone?

One can make any place home: in the sludge and grime of deep soil, one sets up shop: out come the photographs for the shelves: oneself with one’s friends, one’s favorite pet. But other photographs one stares at wondering: who was I that this seemed disposable to me? How is one not monstrous who breaks beauty from curiosity, like a boy cutting open a stray cat to see its guts?

‘Curiosity’ is too weak a word for the wanderlust that drives us, the restlessness that unsettles us; this is what the story of Eden means: the eating of the apple was self-expulsion; one willed one’s own death, a hard thing to remember when it is dark and cold and one hears the worms burrowing all about.

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

Leo Kottke - Vaseline Machine Gun. (For Sazerac and Fuddmain).

We went and saw Kottke play last night; it was wonderful, and there’s really no use saying much more about it than that ‘The Fisherman,’ ‘Year of the Driving Nail,’ and ‘Watermelon’ produce some strange emotional resonance in me that seems roughly comparable to crying with happiness on a camping trip.

Also: this video is extremely impressive to me, and this one is lovely.

“Now I found writing such hard going that it often took me a whole day to compose a single sentence, and no sooner had I thought such a sentence out, with the greatest effort, and written it down, than I saw the awkward falsity of all my constructions and the inadequacy of all the words I had employed. If at times some kind of self-deception nonetheless made me feel that I had done a good day’s work, then as soon as I glanced at the page the next morning I was sure to find the most appalling mistakes, inconsistencies, and lapses staring at me from the paper. However much or little I had written, on a subsequent reading it always seemed so fundamentally flawed that I had to destroy it immediately and begin again. Soon I could not even venture on the first step.”
W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz. (The companion to this).