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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Arthur Koestler and Mamaine Paget. Koestler’s life was extraordinary; as a journalist, Communist, anti-Communist, Leftist internee under the dying French regime while Hitler invaded, and essayist, he saw as much as anyone the consequences of opinion, of weak morality, of deference to evil. Koestler was also a wife-abusing rapist whose treatment of women was uniformly brutal: impregnating and abandoning them to dangerous abortions, cowing them and beating them, permitting only sycophancy in them, he repels even if one admires Darkness at Noon. Julian Barnes, whose own personality emerges from Nothing to be Afraid Of and Flaubert’s Parrot and other works as utterly decent, considered him a friend. In 2000, he and an author of a biography of Koestler fought over the deceased author’s reputation, and in their dispute one encounters again these same questions: Should deeds (and opinions, which can be a kind of deed) beyond the creative work of an artist or thinker matter in the consideration of that work? Does it matter that Heidegger was a Nazi? Does it matter that Polanski was a rapist? Does it matter that Anderson feels Polanski should not face justice? If we set an arbitrary point at which we say such things do matter -we forgive Ted Kennedy but not Polanski, or vice versa; we accept Alec Baldwin’s political declarations but not Jon Voight’s; we despise Heidegger for being a Nazi but not Sartre for defending Stalin; there are endless examples- must we accept that all arbitrarily-set limits are equivalently defensible? These are difficult questions for which I have no answer and in which I lose interest; artists and thinkers are precisely as human as we all are, with the same preponderance of flaws, some unforgivable; what matters to me is the work. Indeed, while most of us do not commit overtly immoral acts it is easy to see how we might be detested. For example: did you vote for Obama? He has increased out use of Predator attack drones vastly; when, years from now, you opine in an interview after your latest book has been released that you loved Obama, the scores of relatives of the innocent collateral damage will loathe you and consider you immoral, and what will you say? Let your handler deal with it! And let’s not think of what our exes and enemies would say of us! Morality and Aesthetics But there is something interesting here: I do not think we are merely arguing about whether to, say, boycott Wes Anderson’s movies because we disagree with him. We regularly buy products from companies which do worse than sign petitions! We pay taxes which fund policies with greater negative impact than op-eds or signatures or the odious opinions of some long-dead author! I think the greater issue is that when a thinker takes a position we consider immoral we begin to doubt the value of their work, a fact I find fascinating. In Heidegger’s case it is perhaps not surprising that we would ponder whether someone who found Hitler reasonable can be trusted to reason -though we might ask Hannah Arendt- but it is notable that we are concerned by Wagner’s anti-Semitism. What does music have to do with racism? It seems to me that there is a common sense that art or thought of any value must have some moral core, that there is a moral basis to aesthetics without which they lose their value, that creative work implicitly expresses the morality of its creator and loses much of its meaning if said morality is dubious in itself or contradicted by the creator’s behavior. If painting, photography, philosophy, film, literature, and so on are problematized by their creators’ failed, repudiated, or incoherent moral codes, then we must accept that morality is more integral to art and thought than we ordinarily suppose, particularly in an age of disputed moralities, of negotiable and relative moralities. Do we restrict the requisite morality of all art to the universal proposals almost all accept: that violence is to be abhorred, that compassion is a virtue? Or do we permit more specific moralities -the morality, say, of feminism, or the “revolutionary morality” of Marxism, or the morality of Christianity- to inform the aesthetic judgement of a work? That is, are these statements equivalently defensible: I cannot believe that a man who supports a child-rapist can make movies worth a damn; he lacks compassion, a sense of humanism, and an understanding of justice; everything he makes will be shallow and unfeeling. I cannot accept that a novel written by a rapist will have any insight into the humanistic concerns of literature; if he cannot feel for his victims, how can he feel for his characters? Everything he writes will be brutally atavistic. I cannot abide music which promotes extramarital sex sung by someone who has been convicted of un-Christian, immoral acts with children; it is repellant and demonstrates a soulless amorality which places him far from real love. When do opinions become deeds? When do deeds become universally detestable? When are you comfortable stating that your morality is sufficient to judge another by? When does immorality impugn art’s credibility? Are there aesthetics without morality?

Arthur Koestler and Mamaine Paget. Koestler’s life was extraordinary; as a journalist, Communist, anti-Communist, Leftist internee under the dying French regime while Hitler invaded, and essayist, he saw as much as anyone the consequences of opinion, of weak morality, of deference to evil.

Koestler was also a wife-abusing rapist whose treatment of women was uniformly brutal: impregnating and abandoning them to dangerous abortions, cowing them and beating them, permitting only sycophancy in them, he repels even if one admires Darkness at Noon.

Julian Barnes, whose own personality emerges from Nothing to be Afraid Of and Flaubert’s Parrot and other works as utterly decent, considered him a friend. In 2000, he and an author of a biography of Koestler fought over the deceased author’s reputation, and in their dispute one encounters again these same questions:

  • Should deeds (and opinions, which can be a kind of deed) beyond the creative work of an artist or thinker matter in the consideration of that work? Does it matter that Heidegger was a Nazi? Does it matter that Polanski was a rapist? Does it matter that Anderson feels Polanski should not face justice?
  • If we set an arbitrary point at which we say such things do matter -we forgive Ted Kennedy but not Polanski, or vice versa; we accept Alec Baldwin’s political declarations but not Jon Voight’s; we despise Heidegger for being a Nazi but not Sartre for defending Stalin; there are endless examples- must we accept that all arbitrarily-set limits are equivalently defensible?

These are difficult questions for which I have no answer and in which I lose interest; artists and thinkers are precisely as human as we all are, with the same preponderance of flaws, some unforgivable; what matters to me is the work. Indeed, while most of us do not commit overtly immoral acts it is easy to see how we might be detested. For example: did you vote for Obama? He has increased out use of Predator attack drones vastly; when, years from now, you opine in an interview after your latest book has been released that you loved Obama, the scores of relatives of the innocent collateral damage will loathe you and consider you immoral, and what will you say? Let your handler deal with it! And let’s not think of what our exes and enemies would say of us!

Morality and Aesthetics

But there is something interesting here: I do not think we are merely arguing about whether to, say, boycott Wes Anderson’s movies because we disagree with him. We regularly buy products from companies which do worse than sign petitions! We pay taxes which fund policies with greater negative impact than op-eds or signatures or the odious opinions of some long-dead author!

I think the greater issue is that when a thinker takes a position we consider immoral we begin to doubt the value of their work, a fact I find fascinating. In Heidegger’s case it is perhaps not surprising that we would ponder whether someone who found Hitler reasonable can be trusted to reason -though we might ask Hannah Arendt- but it is notable that we are concerned by Wagner’s anti-Semitism.

What does music have to do with racism? It seems to me that there is a common sense that art or thought of any value must have some moral core, that there is a moral basis to aesthetics without which they lose their value, that creative work implicitly expresses the morality of its creator and loses much of its meaning if said morality is dubious in itself or contradicted by the creator’s behavior.

If painting, photography, philosophy, film, literature, and so on are problematized by their creators’ failed, repudiated, or incoherent moral codes, then we must accept that morality is more integral to art and thought than we ordinarily suppose, particularly in an age of disputed moralities, of negotiable and relative moralities.

Do we restrict the requisite morality of all art to the universal proposals almost all accept: that violence is to be abhorred, that compassion is a virtue? Or do we permit more specific moralities -the morality, say, of feminism, or the “revolutionary morality” of Marxism, or the morality of Christianity- to inform the aesthetic judgement of a work?

That is, are these statements equivalently defensible:

  1. I cannot believe that a man who supports a child-rapist can make movies worth a damn; he lacks compassion, a sense of humanism, and an understanding of justice; everything he makes will be shallow and unfeeling.
  2. I cannot accept that a novel written by a rapist will have any insight into the humanistic concerns of literature; if he cannot feel for his victims, how can he feel for his characters? Everything he writes will be brutally atavistic.
  3. I cannot abide music which promotes extramarital sex sung by someone who has been convicted of un-Christian, immoral acts with children; it is repellant and demonstrates a soulless amorality which places him far from real love.

When do opinions become deeds? When do deeds become universally detestable? When are you comfortable stating that your morality is sufficient to judge another by? When does immorality impugn art’s credibility? Are there aesthetics without morality?

Tags: morality art arthur koestler julian barnes wes anderson gary glitter roman polanski ted kennedy last post on this i promise
“Wallace was also wary of ideas. He was perpetually on guard against the ways in which abstract thinking (especially thinking about your own thinking) can draw you away from something more genuine and real. To read his acutely self-conscious, dialectically fevered writing was often to witness the agony of cognition: how the twists and turns of thought can both hold out the promise of true understanding and become a danger to it. Wallace was especially concerned that certain theoretical paradigms — the cerebral aestheticism of modernism, the clever trickery of postmodernism — too casually dispense with what he once called “the very old traditional human verities that have to do with spirituality and emotion and community.” He called for a more forthright, engaged treatment of these basic truths. Yet he himself attended to them with his own fractured, often-esoteric methods. It was a defining tension: the very conceptual tools with which he pursued life’s most desperate questions threatened to keep him forever at a distance from the connections he struggled to make.”

James Ryerson, in an essay on David Foster Wallace’s college philosophy thesis (posted by the always-astute Greg Brown). This is a brilliant point.

I like Wallace very much, but I think any honest critical appraisal of his work must admit that this tension was not necessarily one deliberately enacted (and therefore performative, artistic, or creative), but indeed one he couldn’t escape; perhaps none of us can escape it in this era. The question then becomes: was it a strength or a weakness?

I don’t think that in admitting our favorite artists have weaknesses we do them a disservice; indeed, pretending otherwise is to perpetuate a hagiographical fiction that precludes real understanding of their work. That they struggled with foundational weaknesses is what made their art purposive; it is the source of much of it, I think.

At times, I felt that Wallace was very desperately attempting to overcome through co-option the problem of how “abstract thinking” and “theoretical paradigms” negate or subsume “basic truths,” but unsuccessfully. After some of his stories, it seemed clear that this problem cannot be overcome through co-option; discussing the intrusion of ideology, intellectualism, and theory into our art by introducing them into our art to “enact” the problem is like trying to calm ourselves by discussing how nervous we are: sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.

I don’t know how this feature of our age can be overcome (if I did, I would be orders of magnitude smarter, and a writer); various tactics include the deliberate removal of theory from art leaving viciously irreducible corpses of prose, as in McCarthy, or the winnowing of the novel to only the most elegant shapes and sighs, as in Barnes or Kundera. I’m sure other tactics abound: lyricism, impressionism, minimalism.

But I think Wallace was right to recognize that most of these were retreats from the problem, and he was noble for choosing engagement instead; that such engagement sometimes weakened his fiction does not diminish the value of his efforts.

Tags: criticism literature philosophy david foster wallace milan kundera julian barnes cormac mccarthy
Bunnynico posted Tammy Mercure’s Big Rock Candy Mountain photo series. I love this photo, and I love the late nineteenth century hobo song “Big Rock Candy Mountain,” for which Mercure’s series is named. It makes me happy; it’s the sort of dream I wish I had more often. You can hear the song here.  An anthem for indigent drifters, it describes a paradise of alcohol, impotent law enforcement, never having to change clothes, and trees that produce cigarettes. It’s like some innocent synthesis of the fantasies of the homeless, the adolescent, and the drifting. Some lyrics: In the Big Rock Candy Mountains there’s a land that’s fair and brightWhere the handouts grow on bushes and you sleep out every nightWhere the boxcars are all empty and the sun shines every dayOn the birds and the bees and the cigarette treesthe lemonade springs where the bluebird singsIn the Big Rock Candy MountainsIn the Big Rock Candy Mountains all the cops have wooden legsAnd the bulldogs all have rubber teeth and the hens lay soft boiled eggsThe farmer’s trees are full of fruit and the barns are full of hayOh, I’m bound to go where there ain’t no snowWhere the rain don’t fall and the wind don’t blowIn the Big Rock Candy MountainsIn the Big Rock Candy Mountains you never change your socksAnd the little streams of alcohol come a-trickling down the rocksThe brakemen have to tip their hats and the railroad bulls are blindThere’s a lake of stew and of whiskey tooYou can paddle all around ‘em in a big canoeIn the Big Rock Candy MountainsIn the Big Rock Candy Mountains the jails are made of tinAnd you can walk right out again as soon as you are inThere ain’t no short handled shovels, no axes saws or picksI’m a goin to stay where you sleep all dayWhere they hung the jerk that invented workIn the Big Rock Candy Mountains (I mean really: why didn’t we hang whomever invented work, and what about side-by-side lakes of whisky and stew?).

Bunnynico posted Tammy Mercure’s Big Rock Candy Mountain photo series.

I love this photo, and I love the late nineteenth century hobo song “Big Rock Candy Mountain,” for which Mercure’s series is named. It makes me happy; it’s the sort of dream I wish I had more often. You can hear the song here. 

An anthem for indigent drifters, it describes a paradise of alcohol, impotent law enforcement, never having to change clothes, and trees that produce cigarettes. It’s like some innocent synthesis of the fantasies of the homeless, the adolescent, and the drifting.

Some lyrics:

In the Big Rock Candy Mountains there’s a land that’s fair and bright
Where the handouts grow on bushes and you sleep out every night
Where the boxcars are all empty and the sun shines every day
On the birds and the bees and the cigarette trees
the lemonade springs where the bluebird sings
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains

In the Big Rock Candy Mountains all the cops have wooden legs
And the bulldogs all have rubber teeth and the hens lay soft boiled eggs
The farmer’s trees are full of fruit and the barns are full of hay
Oh, I’m bound to go where there ain’t no snow
Where the rain don’t fall and the wind don’t blow
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains

In the Big Rock Candy Mountains you never change your socks
And the little streams of alcohol come a-trickling down the rocks
The brakemen have to tip their hats and the railroad bulls are blind
There’s a lake of stew and of whiskey too
You can paddle all around ‘em in a big canoe
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains

In the Big Rock Candy Mountains the jails are made of tin
And you can walk right out again as soon as you are in
There ain’t no short handled shovels, no axes saws or picks
I’m a goin to stay where you sleep all day
Where they hung the jerk that invented work
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains

(I mean really: why didn’t we hang whomever invented work, and what about side-by-side lakes of whisky and stew?).

Riaz:

Stendhal syndrome, Stendhal’s syndrome or Florence syndrome, is a psychosomatic illness that causes rapid heartbeat, dizziness, confusion and even hallucinations when an individual is exposed to art, usually when the art is particularly ‘beautiful’ or a large amount of art is in a single place.

Bartok’s fourth string quartet, final movement. (Interestingly, Julian Barnes writes a bit ironically about Stendhal’s conflicting diary accounts of his own episode in Florence and ultimately makes the case that the whole syndrome is more a function of recollection than experience).

Tags: bartok music stendhal syndrome riaz moola
“Normally, you would [define a net as] a meshed instrument designed to catch fish. But you could, with no great injury to logic, [call it] a collection of holes tied together with string.”
Julian Barnes. Katydid knows what this is from, I’d bet.
Wreck and Salvage posted this image of a cancer cell metastasizing (from BBC News); since cancer will likely kill more of us than everything but heart disease, I thought we should all probably stare at it for a while. I finished Nothing to be Frightened Of, an exploration undertaken by Julian Barnes of death and its literary discontents; it was extraordinarily fascinating, animated by Barnes’ personal terror of death and admirable honesty in rejecting the usually phony notions of how we “ought” to deal with it, in categorical stages and ‘Bucket List’ sentiments. The plain fact, for me: I am horrified by the fact of my mortality, and I loathe it intensely. The only thing worse: the decrepitude of your final decades as the collapse of your memory slowly robs you of your identity. But the cancer: amazing to see it spread. It’s like looking at the gleaming weapons and massive, fascistically symmetrical formations of an enemy army: a mix of fear, hatred, and awe.

Wreck and Salvage posted this image of a cancer cell metastasizing (from BBC News); since cancer will likely kill more of us than everything but heart disease, I thought we should all probably stare at it for a while.

I finished Nothing to be Frightened Of, an exploration undertaken by Julian Barnes of death and its literary discontents; it was extraordinarily fascinating, animated by Barnes’ personal terror of death and admirable honesty in rejecting the usually phony notions of how we “ought” to deal with it, in categorical stages and ‘Bucket List’ sentiments. The plain fact, for me: I am horrified by the fact of my mortality, and I loathe it intensely.

The only thing worse: the decrepitude of your final decades as the collapse of your memory slowly robs you of your identity.

But the cancer: amazing to see it spread. It’s like looking at the gleaming weapons and massive, fascistically symmetrical formations of an enemy army: a mix of fear, hatred, and awe.

Exact Truths and Beautiful Lies

“Writers need certain stock answers for certain stock questions. When asked What The Novel Does, I tend to answer, “It tells beautiful, shapely lies which enclose hard, exact truths.” -Julian Barnes

In The Republic, Plato condemns art as being manipulative, deceitful, and unreal; he notes that the successful work functionally misleads people into believing things that aren’t true, experiencing emotions they need not feel, and reacting to things not of the actual world.

College students love to argue against these prohibitions, because to them there is nothing more abhorrent than the idea of censorship; MTV has taught them that the free expression of absolutely everything is the most important principle imaginable. That Plato writes at the end of Book IX that he is speaking metaphorically in The Republic, that he is discussing not a city but a metaphor for man’s mind, is ignored.

“…the city of which we are the founders, and which exists in idea only; for I do not believe that there is such an one anywhere on earth? In heaven, I replied, there is laid up a pattern of it, methinks, which he who desires may behold, and beholding, may set his own house in order. But whether such an one exists, or ever will exist in fact, is no matter; for he will live after the manner of that city, having nothing to do with any other.” -Plato

So, Plato says: we must banish the unreal and let only reason rule, in our minds if not our cities. For Plato, this meant art, the fundamentally false, selective, and individually-directed effort to misrepresent the world, for whatever ends, good or evil.

As someone who, like Richard Dawkins, finds life mostly worth living due to “music, poetry, love, sex, (and science),” I find this prohibition absurd; I don’t believe that fidelity to reality is the sole criterion for something’s value. It is certainly the case that fidelity to reality is the most important attribute for, say, a theory of physics or chemistry; it is certainly not the case that the “unreal” quality of Kafka’s novel The Trial reduces its value.

Indeed, lovers of art are familiar with this fact: what reality presents as most salient is not necessarily important to art. Kafka seizes on some existential anxiety rooted in the claustrophobic, systematized, bureaucratic era, and to do so most effectively he discards some of the aspects of reality that are either irrelevant or indeed a hindrance to exploring and communicating human, existential truths. In fact, he lies about some aspects of reality; for example, I’ve been told by some serious scientists that Gregor Samsa could no more wake up a beetle than Jonah could survive the whale’s stomach.

Art’s purpose, after all, is not to recapitulate reality but to get at some existential truth about life, love, death, creation, fear, hope, whatever; if you know someone who criticizes modern art for not being realistic, you likely feel exasperation. Perhaps you want to scream, “If I want a hyperrealistic explanation of how light travels and perspective appears to the human eye, I’ll get some physics and biology professors to explain it!  When I’m looking at Guernica, it’s because I am interested in what humans feel, in their sub-rational guts, when fascists are bombing them into oblivion.”  Art is better at horror than science is. It is also better at love.

It is better because it is human-oriented; it speaks to and comes from inside the human mind, indifferent to the facts and functions of reality.

Richard Dawkins is married; I wonder if at any point in his relationship, he’s ever interrupted a declaration of love by noting, “Well, dear, if not you then someone else; the science is clear; I’m mostly in this gig for reproduction, although my conscious mind dresses it up; let’s not lie about being inimitably connected, perfect for one another, and so on.” Love, after all, is just chemistry and genetics when you strip away the poetry. (Or do you think otherwise?)

Our history has seen the gradual if bumpy rise of individualism: from the animal herd, from the slave society, from the mass of uneducated units bossed by their priest and king, to looser groups in which the individual has greater rights and freedoms… At the same time, as we throw off the rules of priest and king, as science helps us understand the truer terms and conditions on which we live, as our individualism expresses itself in grosser and more selfish ways, we also discover that this individuality, or illusion of individuality, is less than we imagined. As Dawkins memorably puts it, we are “survival machines - robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes.” -Julian Barnes

We are ‘survival machines,’ and yet that isn’t how it feels; one feels a strong urge to believe in love, to believe in hope, to believe in one’s self, in the value of art and creation and peace not in the narrow sense that they ‘enable the survival of my genes’ but in a deeper way; moreover, when communicating, one struggles to impart this meaning to others. When I love, I don’t feel that I am just acting out civilized ornament over animal determination; and I don’t want to.

I am comfortable with “beautiful, shapely lies which enclose hard, exact truths.” What truths: that for the person experiencing pain, it is not chemical; for the person in love, the organs and tissues and hormones involved aren’t what matter; that for the person feeling the expansive sense of joy we all taste in our luckiest, most cherished moments, it’s inconsequential whether he believes an accurate cosmological model or not.

Indeed, you have so little time to live. Is the most important thing that you know truth or that you are happy (and not happy like a teenager with tickets to a concert, but deeply happy in the knowledge that your life has conformed to a model you endorse and believe in)? Do you think on your deathbed you will think, “Man, I was so right about the origin of the universe!” Or will you think of the ways in which you’ve been what you think a person should be? Done what a person should do?

Now, for an atheist, all these questions have satisfactory answers: knowing truth makes me happy, and the sort of person I think I should be isn’t described by a pastor, etc. I am not arguing that belief is ‘better’ than unbelief, but rather that the factual accuracy of a belief system is not the only criterion for judging it and that the scorn some of us smugly atheistic people feel for the religious has more to do with oppositional pride than with any failure of religion.

At their best, an atheist might concede, religions tell hard, exact, existential truths enclosed in beautiful, shapely lies. Do I believe that Jesus rose from the dead?  I don’t.  Do I think that there is a possibly heroic transcendence involved in loving those who harm you, in letting go of your attachment to the world, in living and dying for your principles?  I do. Do I believe in the loaves and fishes? No. Do I believe that material possessions are less important than we are inclined to think? Yes.

I also believe that the subtle philosophical points involved in this subject are too much for many of the people on this planet, but they shouldn’t be excluded from the warmth provided by meaning, art, and ethics; and it is for them that some of those beautiful shapely lies exist.

Dawkins calls such a view patronizing, and it is; I am sorry for that, but I live in the real world. I know people who bear their burdens because they believe a deity walks with them; and their burdens are too great for me to think it witty or fun to mock their belief, either the hard truths about love, sacrifice, patience, fidelity, and death, or the beautiful lies about snakes and arks.

Not only that, but I don’t think their lies inferior to my lies, the ones I tell myself about love and meaning, about my value as an ‘individual,’ and so on; nor do I even consider the artful stories of a religion inferior to the brilliant theories and facts of science, as they address different audiences with different needs. This is why it is so pitiful to see the religious attempt to engage in science to prove their faith; it’s like Picasso trying to tell us we can actually store our wines in the Guernica basement, that it’s real.

“We all know people (is it significant that the ones I can think of are mostly women?) to whom we can sincerely say: “If only everybody were like you, the world’s troubles would melt away.” The milk of human kindness is only a metaphor but, naïve as it sounds, I contemplate some of my friends and I feel like trying to bottle whatever it is that makes them so kind, so selfless, so apparently un-Darwinian.” -Richard Dawkins

I hope Dawkins knows that religion is that: the effort to bottle whatever makes some - Buddha, Jesus- so un-Darwinian.  Religions are often horribly disfigured by corruption, by historical meddling, by politics (the worst influence of all), and so on, but at their core is this effort: to capture, codify, and present in the maximally entrancing, captivating, and persuasive form ‘the milk of human kindness.’

My disagreement with Dawkins, I suppose, comes down to one thing: are beautiful lies needed? I know this much: I need them in art, and I need them in love, and I need them in life; why shouldn’t humans need them in ethics, in morality, and in hope?

[Note: that I believe in the value of religion doesn’t mean I think anyone should believe; after all, I don’t. An argument for utility is not an argument for truth.]

Tags: art dawkins julian barnes love plato religion franz kafka
“The French writer Jules Renard once speculated that ‘Perhaps people with a very good memory cannot have general ideas.’ If so, my brother might get the untrustworthy memory and the general ideas; while I get the reliable memory and the particular ideas.”
Julian Barnes, in “Nothing To Be Frightened Of.” It’s an interesting idea which seems to me to have at least some merit; and I’ve already used it as an excuse for my awful memory twice on this business trip, to middling effect.