mills

Duke Ellington, memorably stating his view on the problem of art’s relationship to entertainment. Clive James argues that it is not an idle lyric but an assertion of aesthetic philosophy made at the time when jazz began to mirror other arts of the 20th century in declaring that anything enjoyable was unserious. The contrast here, then, is between what swings –what can be danced to and whistled and enjoyed by most- and what requires cerebral engagement of a more seated sort: say, late Coltrane (a favorite of mine who comes in for much criticism in this essay). Ellington and James favor the former.

The latter, an obsession with formal considerations and technical problems in the visual, musical, and literary worlds, is the result of artists turning away from audiences and towards one another, or worse: towards critics and academia. That this inward-orientation, this preoccupation with art about art and concerned mainly with other art, has weakened the arts is obvious enough; what audience pays to be ignored? Who wants to watch artists discuss themselves, once the novelty of the formal invention wears off? I once used a simple test in evaluating any work: if an essay is packaged with it, pasted on the wall alongside or as a program before the performance, to explain why it’s not meaningless, the work ought to have been an essay and is in its present form meaningless. If an essay is needed to convey the point, convey the point in an essay! It’s cheaper and easier and better for the audience.

Hundreds of objections to this stance come immediately to mind, however: how low ought to be our denominator in judging intelligibility? How much erudition, education, sophistication, or even simple intelligence can we say is required before we say the piece is insufficiently apprehensible? In other words: whose capacity to dance sets the limit on what we can swing to?

The problem is highlighted by James’ bizarre attack on Coltrane:

“Shapelessness and incoherence are treated as ideals. Above all, and beyond all, there is no end to it. There is no reason except imminent death for the cacophonous parade to stop, a fact which steadily confirms the listener’s impression that there was no reason for it to start. In other words, there is no real momentum, only velocity…supreme mastery of technique has led him to this charmless demonstration… nothing is more quickly copied than virtuosity, and Coltrane had a hundred clones.”

I adore James, but I could scarcely imagine anyone being more confused about the aesthetic interests of an artist than he is about Coltrane’s. Indeed, this is a perfect demonstration of an unfortunate fact: when someone draws a line in art’s history and says that beyond that point art loses its way, it is in nine cases out of ten merely a declaration of the speaker’s failure to understand. It is comparable to the derided declamation of the aging that this or that technology or style of dress is undermining social mores: it represents the point in history at which the speaker jumped off the train.

Art makes wrong turns; much of modern art (and much more of so-called ‘postmodern art’) is wretched, but most of art has always been wretched; it is just that now most bad art is forgotten. The consensus editorial filtering that takes place over time reduces the chaff of previous eras and makes it seem as though our own is populated by self-involved hucksters selling gimmickry as profundity. Hence the amusingly constant concern on the part of the elderly of every generation that nothing is as good as it was in the old days.

Ellington’s assertion is debatable, but it’s important too. I wish more artists would keep it in mind, even if just to override it after some internal struggle. But when I was eleven years old listening to Coltane’s Ole, nothing seemed emptily virtuosic or cacophonous about it to me; it had as much swing as anything I’d ever heard, and still seems to. Art’s progress requires that we learn to dance to novel rhythms, and I hope not to mistake unfamiliar music for swingless noise. (But I’m sure I will).

(Update: Topherchris feels that I have the swing whether or not it means a thing).

George Orwell, via the excellent Sarah Belfort (not posted in relation to this, but not -for me- occurring quite apart from it). One might object to Orwell: if all accounts we give must be disgraceful, there is something amiss about our notions of defeat and disgrace; we cannot expect so much more of humanity than it is capable of, ourselves included, or we are like embittered utopians ready to execute everyone for being less than angels. To say you think of life as a series of defeats is to admit that you’ve been fighting imaginary battles and playing impossible games. Maybe that is the way of the world.

But what of the good in others? What of the good in oneself? Is there none? Is there really only defeat from the inside? Isn’t the morbid preoccupation with all that we are not a form of negative vanity: an inversion of pride that retains its form but negates its content?

I am often criticized by those to whom I am closest for writing too often in a depressive spirit, or being too self-critical, or in some other way –in their view- falsifying or exaggerating a negative view of myself. It means little to say that I write as honestly as I can (if it strikes a phony chord, its intent is irrelevant). Are they accusing me, perhaps, of making a show of my disgrace? And isn’t that an odd wrinkle of the modern era: the pride we feel in our abjection?

One hopes to be lucid and unsentimental about oneself, but it is difficult. In any event, I am partial to Orwell’s point but consider it likely that such an injunction as the one above will distort one’s writing: if, after all, biography or fiction ought never be solely concerned with “revealing the disgraceful” -and David Foster Wallace is right to say it shouldn’t- neither should autobiography, unless we say that honesty about oneself is fully impossible.

(That may be the case).

W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz. Related to myths surrounding reason are myths surrounding the will. Nothing is more illusory than the notion of cognitive self-determination; not only is reason generally a pretext for decisions made and preferences harbored beneath our consciousness awareness, but when applied willfully reason just barely affects us: hence failed diets, lapsed promises, submission to temptations, unresisted compulsions, and the years of therapy one needs to accomplish the smallest change.

False fiction in all media often relies on epiphanic character development: in a moment of awareness, someone changes deeply. Yet it is only the harshest traumas and the most transformative immersions that change us. In real life, the moment of change is often followed by something less examined: the gradual attenuation of the epiphany, the diminution of the decision, the regression to what came before. One thinks, “I am changed! Never again!” Or: “From now on!” But one remains the same.

(In instances where a dramatic break seems to have happened –a shooting, perhaps- one often discovers on investigation something more like the slow removal of a bandage, tearing at a wound’s edges as it comes off: at some recent point in the shooter’s life, the failed effort at healing was abandoned and the damage was now exposed to the world. But the sore was always there. It is perhaps our guilt or embarrassment at not seeing it –or worse, at seeing it and looking away in the hope that it would scar over- that drive us to say: “He just snapped.”).

A probably controversial illustration of the difference between true and false character development in this respect: Dostoevsky’s manifestly false idea-based caricatures deciding to murder one another based on ideas they develop in libraries and Tolstoy’s unforgettably real characters, whose actions are often comically dressed in ornate rationalizations but whose true motives we see in the structure of their personalities.

One might say that reason is just a pretext used by the darker, deeper parts of the psyche, like a toy steering wheel attached to a missile following its own trajectory, or -if one wants to concede that it has some effect- one could describe it as a tiny rudder on an enormous ocean liner, steaming ahead towards whatever its likes as its captain self-assuredly turns his massive, useless wooden wheel.

Christopher Buckley, toward whose writing I feel an ungenerous ambivalence -it is too flip for its subject, often, but will then wreck its humor with a dark and arresting turn of phrase- describing his father’s decline and death.

It will come as no surprise that I am not particularly interested in the politics of the Buckleys; so far as I am concerned, the virulence with which William F. Buckley’s death was greeted in some quarters was quite unjustifiable given that he was a writer and thinker who had the right to his opinions and their assertion. He harmed no one, or if he did we must be prepared to say that expressing certain ideas is harmful or immoral, a concept I reject.

What interests me about this piece is not the minimal political content but the flat honestly of the son’s writing, an honesty which seems alternately brave or foolish. Buckley is either courageous for admitting into evidence the pettiness we can feel in the midst of grief or he is unaware of how hard it is for people to accept that such feelings are common, how likely they are to judge him unfairly for putting them to paper.

Throughout, he refers to scenes from within his family that have the chill of truth to them: the strange, un-diagnosable pathologies of mendacity and aloofness in his parents, the sanctimonious and cruel letters from the son, the ordinary, simple, overwhelming feelings beneath all this cruft: the family’s bleeding heart beneath its machinery.

And of course there is the irreducible problem of death, which has appeared in the lives of my friends this week even as my own father emerges from the hospital. I have not called him or seen him; we didn’t discuss his surgery in advance; I didn’t know until it was over; and I wonder if we are close, or not close, or fine. Buckley’s father wrote of his last novel, “This one didn’t work for me. Sorry.” Sometimes I get similarly short messages from my father suggesting that I not write what I do, or that I write in another manner he prefers. Is this honesty the right of the aging, who don’t want to waste words lying as time shortens? Are hurt feelings something they cannot remember, or do they see that something more important than feelings is at stake?

Many years ago, I was advised to remember when considering ‘collateral damage’ in war that every human has a mother, which is to say that everyone we might consider a statistically acceptable, materially expendable unit of the species is, for someone, the most important person in the entire world. It’s as well to think of children and their parents, I think, and to remember that the interiority of every family is virtually impenetrable, immune to meaningful analysis except by particularly good writing. Recalling such things can stay our reductive judgement, our tendency to dismiss, deride, or despise others struggling through the same life we lead.

(Tolstoy’s line that “every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way” is well-illustrated -as if illustration beyond our experience were needed- by the contrast between the Buckleys and the Baldwins, the latter described in strange detail and with questionable conclusions in an occasionally funny article by Caitlynn Flanagan at The Atlantic).

Louis Aragon, quoted by my sister Nudawn. That there is no consensus position among philosophers and scientists concerning the problem of reason’s relation to the external world, whether it is coincidentally isomorphic, imperfectly virtualizing, merely descriptive, or something more, was partly responsible for the many answers I received to this question.

Nevertheless, this seems clear to me: given that our senses are not literally perceptive and not even synthetic so much as creative, and that our perpetually-improving theories of the world are irreducibly based on these senses and are themselves not “the world” as such so much as arbitrarily scaled and detailed and imagined models, I think this quote is quite right and beautifully-put.

A myth of our time: that reason is not a form of imagination but is the structural code of the universe. A caveat: that it is a form of imagination does not reduce its predictive power anymore than navigational charts which presumed the stars were a “fixed firmament of orbs” were unable to steer ships for being based on a dream.

Imagination is an incredible form of virtualization, of analysis, of enactment and reflection; it is the primary creative act before all others, and it is not dismissive to call “imaginative” an act of reasoning which acquaints us more closely with a universe written in a language not our own. But it has always been and will always be a problem among humans that we see fantasy and delusion in the imaginations of others and truth and beauty in our own.

J.K. Galbraith, quoted by the excellent Chad and reblogged by many of my absolute favorites, towards whom I mean no disrespect by the following:

I like Galbraith, but this is patently untrue; even if it were the functional outcome of conservative policy, it is no more accurate than saying that “Communists were engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for killing everyone who doesn’t submit to your rule and many more besides.”

That’s what they wrought, but it’s not what they searched for. The transformation of what we all seek -a better world for ourselves and those we care for- into what we create -a world of faction, discord, exploitation, and needless suffering- is the crucial mystery of human life. Why does all we touch turn to dust?

If one does not understand that those whose beliefs one despises believe them just as one believe one’s own, with the same sense of logical clarity, moral decency, and threatened sensitivity, one does not understand humanity, history, conflict, or even, perhaps, the nature of reason.

For Galbraith to perpetuate the idea that whomever we disagree with we ought to fault for evil intentions or selfishness is odd; I am astonished at the statistically-indefensible reductionism of it. Tens of millions of individuals aggregated into a mass and crushed beneath a patronizing quip, the thrust of which is simple: if you don’t agree with me, it’s because you’re a bad person and your arguments are just pretexts.

I remember when conservatives described anti-war protesters as “America-hating radicals in peace-protester disguise; they want us to lose!” And I recall when any activity against their interests was ascribed by Soviet or American cold warriors to “the subterfuge of the enemy.” It is common enough to deny the agency of disagreeable individual actors and suggest that only the gnosis of the party elite can detect the true (devious and dim) motivations of the automata across the ideological divide. It is common and it is wrong, logically and ethically.

Here is the question one must ask: is it possible to imagine someone with a good heart and a sound or even brilliant mind who disagrees with our political beliefs? If no one with a good heart or mind can disagree with us, why should we permit the enfranchisement of those who disagree? If we know what is right, what principle of pluralism could possibly obstruct our implementation of what is right? This is the justification, of course, which all totalitarians use: why let evil or stupid inferior-types restrain our progress?

If we say that we can imagine such a person -or better, that we know such people, as I do-, we’ll see at once how silly Galbraith is here. (I might add that Galbraith is engaged in an old sort of moral philosophy, too: the ad hominem insulting of opponents to avoid the difficulty of empathy, engagement, and persuasion).

I have known both liberals and conservatives vastly smarter and of better character than I am; I suppose I am lucky for that, or I might be inclined to believe that anyone who doesn’t accept my reasoning is just looking for a fancy disguise for their low immorality. As it is, I must accept the basic proposition of democracy: no man can be said with finality to know what is best, or what is in his peers’ hearts.

(Note: My hero Langer has already responded).