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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“The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.”

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).

IMs on the occasion of our one-year Tumblr quasi-anniversary of sorts: Elle: Ping mothafucka! Mills: One second; on a call. I will call back, promise! Elle: Oh yeah, one second. This really is like a real anniversary. You at the office, casually trying to pretend to care. And me at home, drinking alone. Ignoring the fact that the vision of me as a workaholic staying late at night to drip out more managerial effluvia is preposterous, there is also the fact that only Hell Belle would think the above photo will inspire pity! Poor Hell Belle, on a pier at sunset sipping cider: the tears are stinging my eyes; I will not smile again in this life. Happy anniversary! (Maybe in another year or five I can be one of your Tumblr crushes!)

IMs on the occasion of our one-year Tumblr quasi-anniversary of sorts:

Elle: Ping mothafucka! 
Mills: One second; on a call. I will call back, promise! 
Elle: Oh yeah, one second. This really is like a real anniversary. You at the office, casually trying to pretend to care. And me at home, drinking alone.

Ignoring the fact that the vision of me as a workaholic staying late at night to drip out more managerial effluvia is preposterous, there is also the fact that only Hell Belle would think the above photo will inspire pity! Poor Hell Belle, on a pier at sunset sipping cider: the tears are stinging my eyes; I will not smile again in this life.

Happy anniversary! (Maybe in another year or five I can be one of your Tumblr crushes!)

Chad, with whom I have rather a lot in common, took this after finding a fallen street lamp and putting a wireless strobe inside of it. I happen to love this image in itself, but also as several potential texts; indeed, one of the things I like most about visual art is that it permits a free and fluid series of readings to congregate in and emerge from works like this. Usually, these occur as sentence fragments or short narratives: this dying light still charged by the high-voltage grid, illuminating little as its peers in their plumage of color look on; or: the pure white light of death; or: dying just beyond the source of all things, the door to which reads “KEEP OUT.” I am clumsily literal-minded, I know; it is why I struggle with poetry. But for me, images which permit the casual and associative narrativizing of their content are something more than beautiful. And that this was a chance encounter coupled with a deliberate artistic step makes it even more delightful to me; I love the photographic combination of happenstance and intentionality.

Chad, with whom I have rather a lot in common, took this after finding a fallen street lamp and putting a wireless strobe inside of it.

I happen to love this image in itself, but also as several potential texts; indeed, one of the things I like most about visual art is that it permits a free and fluid series of readings to congregate in and emerge from works like this. Usually, these occur as sentence fragments or short narratives: this dying light still charged by the high-voltage grid, illuminating little as its peers in their plumage of color look on; or: the pure white light of death; or: dying just beyond the source of all things, the door to which reads “KEEP OUT.”

I am clumsily literal-minded, I know; it is why I struggle with poetry. But for me, images which permit the casual and associative narrativizing of their content are something more than beautiful. And that this was a chance encounter coupled with a deliberate artistic step makes it even more delightful to me; I love the photographic combination of happenstance and intentionality.

“This running against the walls of our cage is perfectly, absolutely hopeless. Ethics so far as it springs from the desire to say something about the ultimate meaning of life, the absolute good, the absolute valuable, can be no science. What it says does not add to our knowledge in any sense. But it is a document of a tendency in the human mind which I personally cannot help respecting deeply and I would not for my life ridicule it.”
B. Michael quoted Wittgenstein’s Lecture on Ethics, which he wrote “guides my thinking on the Christianity thing and much more.”
The tree under which my grandfather’s ashes are scattered. Every trip to the ranch has its theme, probably because everything there resonates in me. Some trips seem merely diverting and some seem momentous, laden with epiphanies and euphoria, but always after I return to the city everything settles back into its ordinary place. Our breathless realizations have little effect on us, whatever their initial revolutionary luster. Nothing disturbs the habits of our selves. Will, John, Spencer, Andy, and I were accompanied by my dogs, some deer, and a ludicrous number of pigs; they’re taking over the forests and pastures. The full photoset is here, and below are some excerpts: Will in the pasture late at night, shining for animals. I did a lot of moonlight shooting; most of it I screwed up. I am fonder of clouds than I was now that I have a use for them. In the ruins of the shack my great-grandfather used to stay in I found checks from 1931 which he signed (his name was Roger Mills Thomas), an old Christmas card, various oddities, and this newspaper from the day Oswald was shot (lower part of page here). John seemed to think that long exposure ghosting was a superpower, as though his translucency in the shot gave him translucency in real life; he referred to this as “the Predator effect.” Around the fire (which was partly made through Darwin-Award-courting heroism). Spencer and his “king size” guitar behind the house. I don’t want to disappoint Kevin, so here is Bayou after another ineffectual effort at getting an armadillo and here is Five in the same state; it’s nice to let them go crazy without fear they’ll harm anything. Toward the end of the set both dogs demonstrate their relative climbing prowess, and Will his firefighter guts.

The tree under which my grandfather’s ashes are scattered.

Every trip to the ranch has its theme, probably because everything there resonates in me. Some trips seem merely diverting and some seem momentous, laden with epiphanies and euphoria, but always after I return to the city everything settles back into its ordinary place. Our breathless realizations have little effect on us, whatever their initial revolutionary luster. Nothing disturbs the habits of our selves.

Will, John, Spencer, Andy, and I were accompanied by my dogs, some deer, and a ludicrous number of pigs; they’re taking over the forests and pastures. The full photoset is here, and below are some excerpts:

Will in the pasture late at night, shining for animals. I did a lot of moonlight shooting; most of it I screwed up.

I am fonder of clouds than I was now that I have a use for them.

In the ruins of the shack my great-grandfather used to stay in I found checks from 1931 which he signed (his name was Roger Mills Thomas), an old Christmas card, various oddities, and this newspaper from the day Oswald was shot (lower part of page here).

John seemed to think that long exposure ghosting was a superpower, as though his translucency in the shot gave him translucency in real life; he referred to this as “the Predator effect.”

Around the fire (which was partly made through Darwin-Award-courting heroism).

Spencer and his “king size” guitar behind the house.

I don’t want to disappoint Kevin, so here is Bayou after another ineffectual effort at getting an armadillo and here is Five in the same state; it’s nice to let them go crazy without fear they’ll harm anything. Toward the end of the set both dogs demonstrate their relative climbing prowess, and Will his firefighter guts.

“In these very rare cases the patient imagines that everything happening around him is a veiled reference to his personality and existence. He excludes real people from the conspiracy - because he considers himself to be so much more intelligent than other men. Phenomenal nature shadows him wherever he goes. Clouds in the staring sky transmit to one another, by means of slow signs, incredibly detailed information regarding him. His inmost thoughts are discussed at nightfall, in manual alphabet, by darkly gesticulating trees. Pebbles or stains or sun flecks form patterns representing in some awful way messages which he must intercept. Everything is a cipher and of everything he is the theme. Some of the spies are detached observers, such as glass surfaces and still pools; others, such as coats in store windows, are prejudiced witnesses, lynchers at heart; others again (running water, storms) are hysterical to the point of insanity, have a distorted opinion of him and grotesquely misinterpret his actions. He must be always on his guard and devote every minute and module of life to the decoding of the undulation of things. The very air he exhales is indexed and filed away.”

Riazm (of No Correlation and these amazing photos) posted this quote from Vladimir Nabokov’s “Signs and Symbols.”

Nabokov was such a talented stylist it’s almost hard to bear; I could read this over and over. The “…darkly gesticulating trees,” the composition of the “awful messages” from nature, the world as cipher coding a message for oneself, the glass and the coats-as-lynchers: this whole passage ought to be required reading for students of psychosis, fear, and/or literature.

“He must…devote every minute and module of life to the decoding of the undulation of things.”

GPOYW. Learning begins as imitation. That our society is brutally intolerant of mimesis is reflective of its preoccupation with ‘originality’ and ‘authenticity,’ a preoccupation -it has been noted- that the authentic rarely have. That is to say: only those worried about being imitative deride others for imitation. The authentic just live and do and make. Of the things I’ve learned in life, what I’ve absorbed first through imitation and interiorization has stayed with me: instruments, language, etc. What I’ve attempted to learn through high-level systematic abstraction -“methodologies” and “programs” and “theories”- has not. I learned more music theory from playing piano than from years of studying “theory.” As my high school asserted in its motto, “We learn by doing.” All of which is to say: I am aware that this image is imitative, derivative, hackneyed. I also liked making it, and learned something about light and exposure from making it that I could not have learned as deeply from my reading. So much of learning is this way; it can be exhausting and embarrassing if one makes a goal of originality. But originality results accidentally from the chance combination of experience and ability; if it is willed, it is a contrivance. So I try to just imitate what fascinates me, do what I like, and hopefully stumble into something interesting; it doesn’t reliably work, but I know of no better path than the one always advised: make what you like to make. (Note also: I wanted to superimpose a textual meaning on it, to say that it reminded me of the essential vacuity of the self and the way that personality forms a distracting show around one’s emptiness, but even I have my limits of pretension).

GPOYW. Learning begins as imitation. That our society is brutally intolerant of mimesis is reflective of its preoccupation with ‘originality’ and ‘authenticity,’ a preoccupation -it has been noted- that the authentic rarely have. That is to say: only those worried about being imitative deride others for imitation. The authentic just live and do and make.

Of the things I’ve learned in life, what I’ve absorbed first through imitation and interiorization has stayed with me: instruments, language, etc. What I’ve attempted to learn through high-level systematic abstraction -“methodologies” and “programs” and “theories”- has not. I learned more music theory from playing piano than from years of studying “theory.” As my high school asserted in its motto, “We learn by doing.”

All of which is to say: I am aware that this image is imitative, derivative, hackneyed. I also liked making it, and learned something about light and exposure from making it that I could not have learned as deeply from my reading. So much of learning is this way; it can be exhausting and embarrassing if one makes a goal of originality.

But originality results accidentally from the chance combination of experience and ability; if it is willed, it is a contrivance. So I try to just imitate what fascinates me, do what I like, and hopefully stumble into something interesting; it doesn’t reliably work, but I know of no better path than the one always advised: make what you like to make.

(Note also: I wanted to superimpose a textual meaning on it, to say that it reminded me of the essential vacuity of the self and the way that personality forms a distracting show around one’s emptiness, but even I have my limits of pretension).

“Only loss is universal, and true cosmopolitanism in this world must be based on suffering.”
Ignazio Silone, who pulled his dead mother from the rubble of Abruzzo’s 1915 earthquake, quoted in an article about that tragedy.
Indefinite recovery: a blue tarp at sundown. It’s been in place for years now (via Photophobia).
Indefinite recovery: a blue tarp at sundown. It’s been in place for years now (via Photophobia).
“The whole development of dialectic should be a warning against the dangers inherent in philosophical system-building. It should remind us that philosophy should not be made a basis for any sort of scientific system and that philosophers should be much more modest in their claims.”

Karl Popper in “What is Dialectic?” quoted by Velvet Robots. Kierkegaard obviously would have agreed, but it was Nietzsche -an aphorist more than a philosopher- who put it most concisely: “The will to a system is a lack of integrity.”

It is the immediate urge of every thinker, professional or casual, to extend his or her conclusions outward, to apply opinions to one subject and instance after another as though stamping envelopes, to build out of any impressions a world-sized worldview.

But the mind is not the world, though it may come close to containing it; and reason is not isomorphic to the laws of the universe, though almost everyone believes it is. Thus the will to a system is a lack of integrity in two senses: (1) it falsifies the nature of thought and exaggerates the power of cognition, creation, and analysis, and (2) it subordinates to reason all other categories of experience, and even the subject who experiences: this is the Existential critique of Hegel, that he crushes the human beneath the system (a critique that came long before Sartre, particularly in literature).

I love that Nietzsche considered giving in to the systematizing temptation a “lack of integrity” and that Popper wanted philosophers to be “much more modest in their claims.” Both display heroic honesty about the limits of their field, a rarity among intellectuals.

Whereas the wind blows through her hair precisely as it does through the branches of the fields, it buffets me as an advertising banner in a parking lot: my clothes pull and then slacken across my back, I lean awkwardly into it and squint, I face down and shuffle, I look for cover. Among the many ways in which I remain a naively adolescent boy is this: I view women as effortlessly woven into the natural world, while I stand apart from it awkwardly.  It can feel to me as though women are birds in flight, while I am like a turtle in a plastic aquarium or a deprecated robot in a midwestern university lab. This lyrical impression of women can be critiqued in any number of ways, and above all in that it is not true. But very little that is lyrical has statistical accuracy and nothing is duller than the politicization of poetics. Ever ill-at-ease in the world, ashamed of the contrivance of my personality, disgusted by my graceless body, I am happy enough to believe in the possibility that half of humanity is not so afflicted. My believing it is assisted by the fact that I know nothing at all about women, like many men. If this ignorance grates, I apologize, but romanticization is largely an act of deliberate incomprehension. Even if I could understand, I’m not sure how useful that would be. To be irresponsibly in love, one must be partly blind, and sometimes I wish I would put my eyes out.

Whereas the wind blows through her hair precisely as it does through the branches of the fields, it buffets me as an advertising banner in a parking lot: my clothes pull and then slacken across my back, I lean awkwardly into it and squint, I face down and shuffle, I look for cover.

Among the many ways in which I remain a naively adolescent boy is this: I view women as effortlessly woven into the natural world, while I stand apart from it awkwardly.  It can feel to me as though women are birds in flight, while I am like a turtle in a plastic aquarium or a deprecated robot in a midwestern university lab.

This lyrical impression of women can be critiqued in any number of ways, and above all in that it is not true. But very little that is lyrical has statistical accuracy and nothing is duller than the politicization of poetics. Ever ill-at-ease in the world, ashamed of the contrivance of my personality, disgusted by my graceless body, I am happy enough to believe in the possibility that half of humanity is not so afflicted.

My believing it is assisted by the fact that I know nothing at all about women, like many men. If this ignorance grates, I apologize, but romanticization is largely an act of deliberate incomprehension. Even if I could understand, I’m not sure how useful that would be. To be irresponsibly in love, one must be partly blind, and sometimes I wish I would put my eyes out.

“…he had no special face to signify a funny remark. He just said it, the way that the best conversational wits always do. In conversation, “joke” is a deadly word: anyone who relishes improvised humor will duck for cover if he hears a prepared joke coming.”

Clive James on Dick Cavett. An awful trap: those who desperately want to be funny alight when they’re soon to share what they hope will amuse us, their faces spreading into smiles before the words even form in their mouths. This is the moment they wait for: to drop the joke and get the laugh.

But that smile is poison: very little is funny once someone wants it to be funny, and the more they want us to laugh the less likely our laughter is to be spontaneous. In most cases, their anticipatory grin is met with our forced grimace, the phony simulated smile we all loathe for making us liars. This is true of televised comedy, too.

When we are expected to laugh, anxiety over whether we will laugh contaminates our otherwise receptive minds; we think only of hurting our friend, not of any humor that might emerge. Also, people who want to be funny are often just not: again, a sad trick of the universe likely related to the fact that for them, humor is not something naturally occurring but a fabricated social resource they want to posses; thus, they don’t get humor at all.

We cannot will emotional reactions, so these sorts of interactions can be extremely painful. It would be best if none of us wanted to be funny (or smart, or handsome, or talented, or whatever), but in lieu of that we might just all work on perfecting our compassionately deceitful faces: “That is hilarious!”

I try to find meta-humor in the whole farce: the escalating dread as I realize that a David Brent-type wants me to guffaw, the tension rising as the awful punchline awkwardly approaches, the gaping stare as he examines my eyes to see if I’m truly amused, the cavern of insecurity in him in which my fake laughter echoes, etc. And one can always laugh at the fact that one has surely made others feel this way.

Incidentally, this dread of failing to have the appropriate emotional or instinctual reaction is why I no longer have sex. Just kidding! Are you laughing? I’m watching very closely: look out of your window. (One reason I never even try to be funny online: too often I want to overtly indicate that I’m joking, a killer failing; I lack the fearlessness of, say, Cameron or Bag Coffee).

…and… Leaves, trunk, and roots, at night (via Photophobia and Flickr).

…and…

Leaves, trunk, and roots, at night (via Photophobia and Flickr).

“Think that you might be wrong.”

Will, quoting (and posting a photo of) a favorite piece of New Orleans graffiti. A perpetually interrogatory relationship with one’s conclusions can lead to the archetypal paralysis of Hamlet, but it is a crucial element of real humanism and the only possible defense against arrogance and intellectual atrophy.

The always-excellent Rabsteen added an amusing anecdote and, to complement a cited Karl Popper aphorism, this quote from Betrand Russell: “Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.” Immediately we see the tension between doubt and self-assurance, between the courage to question oneself and the courage to not.

Not long ago, Jeff Miller and I had an appropriately inconclusive discussion about the problem of certainty, of ideological passion: it drove the Inquisition and the abolitionists, the Nazis and the Founders, Lenin and Gandhi. Milan Kundera noted that the eternal precondition of tragedy is the “existence of ideals that are considered more valuable than human life,” but that is also one of the components of historical progress, individual transcendence, and heroism. For every erroneous conviction there may be one that advances us all. Certainty, then, cannot be the enemy; only error can. And, for the umpteenth time, “Error is the central feature of human existence.”

I’m fortunate to be wrong all the time, often in crucially important ways (as many here can attest). This idea is thus never far from my mind, although it scarcely saves me the frequent embarrassment. But it does remind me of my limitless fallibility, a lesson I cannot learn too often (apparently!).

To my wife You have put the little ones to bed dear wifeAnd coverd them ore with careMy Frankey Alley and FredAnd they have said their evening prair Perhaps they breathed the name of oneWho is far in southern landAnd wished he to were thareto join their little band I am very sad to night dear wifeMy thoughts are dwelling on home and theeAs I keep the lone night watchBeneath the holley tree The winds are sighing through the treesAnd as they onward roamThey whisper hopes of happynessWithin our cottage home And as they onward pasedOre hill and vale and bubling streamThey wake up thoughts within my soulLike music in a dream Oh when will this rebellion ceaseThis cursed war be oreAnd we our dear ones meatTo part from them no more? Amos Humiston, March 25th 1863. From Errol Morris’ NYT piece on Humiston’s life, death at Gettysburg, and above all the strange and sad story of how the photograph of his children -“Frankey Alley and Fred”- found on his body after the battle became a newspaper sensation and the manner for his wife’s discovery that he was dead (and much more). It is one of Morris’ finer efforts, I think, and besides: how moving to think of ordinary men who wrote such poems to their wives from the battlefield.
To my wife

You have put the little ones to bed dear wife
And coverd them ore with care
My Frankey Alley and Fred
And they have said their evening prair

Perhaps they breathed the name of one
Who is far in southern land
And wished he to were thare
to join their little band

I am very sad to night dear wife
My thoughts are dwelling on home and thee
As I keep the lone night watch
Beneath the holley tree

The winds are sighing through the trees
And as they onward roam
They whisper hopes of happyness
Within our cottage home

And as they onward pased
Ore hill and vale and bubling stream
They wake up thoughts within my soul
Like music in a dream

Oh when will this rebellion cease
This cursed war be ore
And we our dear ones meat
To part from them no more?

Amos Humiston, March 25th 1863. From Errol Morris’ NYT piece on Humiston’s life, death at Gettysburg, and above all the strange and sad story of how the photograph of his children -“Frankey Alley and Fred”- found on his body after the battle became a newspaper sensation and the manner for his wife’s discovery that he was dead (and much more).

It is one of Morris’ finer efforts, I think, and besides: how moving to think of ordinary men who wrote such poems to their wives from the battlefield.